What is Faraday?

Faraday is a surname, not a technology. Michael Faraday was a British scientist, born in 1791, whose work on electromagnetism underpins a great deal of modern electrical engineering. He discovered electromagnetic induction, built the first electric motor, and in 1836 demonstrated the effect that carries his name: a conductive enclosure shields its interior from external electric fields.

Everything we sell works on that principle. It has not changed in nearly two centuries.

How a Faraday enclosure works

When a radio-frequency signal meets a conductive surface, most of its energy is reflected. Some is absorbed by the material and dissipated as heat. Only a small remainder passes through. Wrap that conductive surface completely around an object and you have isolated it: signals outside cannot reach in, and signals from inside cannot get out.

That is a Faraday cage. A Faraday bag is the same thing in flexible form, using conductive fabric instead of solid metal. A shielding garment is the same material again, cut to be worn.

The performance of any of these is called shielding effectiveness, and it is measured in decibels of attenuation. It is not a single number. It varies substantially across the frequency spectrum, and it depends heavily on whether the enclosure is actually closed. A bag that performs well sealed will perform very differently with the flap open.

What our products do

Key Guards. A relay attack works by capturing the low-frequency signal your key fob emits — through a wall, a door or a window — and repeating it beside your car. Sealed inside a Key Guard, the fob's signal cannot reach the thief's receiver. There is nothing to relay, and the attack does not complete.

Stuff Guards. Faraday bags for phones, tablets, laptops, cards and passports. Sealed, a device inside cannot transmit or receive: no cellular, no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, no GPS, no NFC. You can test this in thirty seconds — put a phone inside, seal it, and call it. It will not ring.

Body Guards. Conductive silver-fibre textiles — garments, wraps and canopies — that attenuate radio-frequency energy reaching the area they cover.

DIY Guards. Shielding fabric, tape and mesh sold by the metre for people building their own enclosures.

Why people choose shielding fabric

Conductive textiles do the same job as a Faraday bag, in a form you can wear or drape. Silver, copper or nickel fibres woven through the fabric reflect and absorb incident radio-frequency energy, so less of it passes through to whatever the fabric covers.

People buy shielding fabric for a range of reasons. Some want to reduce the RF energy in a specific place — a bed, a desk, a chair beside a router. Some are shielding equipment rather than themselves. Some work in environments dense with transmitters and simply prefer to lower their exposure, in the same way a person might choose to sit further from a speaker without believing the speaker is dangerous. Some are following a precautionary principle in the absence of settled long-term evidence.

We take no position on health outcomes and we make no health claims. We do not claim our products prevent, treat or reduce the risk of any medical condition. What we can tell you is what the material does, measured: how much RF energy it attenuates, across which frequencies, under which test method. That is what our testing establishes, and we will send you the documentation on request.

What shielding fabric will not do

We would rather tell you this now than have you find out after buying.

• It will not shield low-frequency magnetic fields. The 50/60 Hz magnetic fields produced by building wiring, appliances and transmission lines pass straight through conductive textiles. Blocking them requires ferromagnetic shielding, which we do not supply. Some sellers are vague about this. We are not.
• A garment is not a sealed enclosure. It has openings. RF passes through them. A garment attenuates energy reaching the area it covers, while it is in place and intact — nothing more.
• Shielding does nothing about sources already inside. A canopy over a bed does not affect the phone on the bedside table underneath it.
• A bag only works sealed. Partially closed is not closed.

If you need genuine isolation of a device, use a sealed Stuff Guard rather than a fabric.

How our products are tested

Shielding effectiveness is a measurement, not an adjective. Our shielding materials are tested by independent laboratories for attenuation across a frequency sweep, and results are reported as a curve rather than as a single headline figure — because any single percentage quoted without a frequency attached is meaningless.

Testing also covers material composition and coating uniformity, durability after heat, humidity and mechanical stress, and for textiles, performance after repeated laundering — because conductive coatings degrade with wear, and a figure measured on new fabric does not describe a garment after fifty washes.

Test documentation is available for any product in the range. Email info@thefaraday.co, tell us the product, and we will send it.

Shielding and grounding are different things

Shielding puts a conductive barrier between a signal and whatever is behind it. Grounding connects your body to earth potential through a conductive path, so that your body voltage relative to the ground settles toward zero. In a wired building your body couples capacitively to the AC wiring around you and floats at a small potential above earth; a grounded sheet or mat gives that charge somewhere to go. The effect is immediate and directly measurable with a multimeter.

Beyond that electrical effect, grounding has been studied in humans for outcomes including sleep, stress markers, recovery and circulation. Those studies are small, early and in most cases not independently replicated at scale. We summarise them with full citations on our Earthing & Grounding page so you can read the sources and form your own view. We do not claim any health benefit from our products.