Skin-contact wearable
Silicone, almost always. Regulatory clarity plus feel.
Materials guide for OEM buyers
Silicone, rubber and TPE — what each is good for.
Three material families that look and feel similar to a non-specialist, but behave very differently in production and in service. Written to save an OEM buyer an afternoon of confusion.
Start here
Silicone for temperature, chemistry and skin. Rubber for load, wear and cost. TPE for recyclability and injection speed.
That's it, roughly. Silicone (a family of synthetic elastomers based on siloxane chemistry) handles temperature and skin contact well and is expensive. Natural and synthetic rubbers (EPDM, nitrile, natural rubber, and cousins) are cheaper and handle industrial loading well but don't like high temperatures or UV. TPEs (thermoplastic elastomers) look and feel like rubber but process like plastic — injection-mouldable and recyclable, at the cost of some elastic performance.
For most OEM decisions, the family choice is obvious once you know the environment the part is going to live in. It's the grade selection within the family where most of the wrong decisions get made. That's covered in the sections below.
None of this is a datasheet substitute. It's the shape of the conversation we have with a buyer who hasn't specified silicone or rubber before. If you already know what family you want, skip to the materials page for grade-level detail.
Silicone family
When silicone is the answer.
Silicone earns its higher cost across a specific set of environments. If you don't need any of them, one of the other families is probably cheaper.
Wide temperature range
Standard silicones run comfortably from around -50°C to +200°C. Specialist grades push further both directions. Nothing else in the elastomer family covers this range.
Skin and food contact
Documented food and medical grades are common. Cure chemistry is clean; leachables are low; regulatory documentation is well-established.
Chemical resistance
Broad chemical compatibility, especially with polar solvents and oxidising agents. Not universal — flag your specific chemicals at enquiry.
UV and ozone stability
Silicones don't degrade in UV or ozone the way natural rubber does. For outdoor or long-life applications, that's often the deciding factor.
Rubber family
When rubber wins.
For a large majority of industrial rubber parts, rubber (not silicone) is the right answer. Silicone is over-specified out of habit in a lot of places it doesn't belong.
EPDM for water and weather
Outdoor sealing, weather stripping, water systems, roofing. Excellent water and UV resistance, moderate temperature range, low cost.
Nitrile for hydrocarbons
Fuel systems, oil seals, hydraulic components. Excellent hydrocarbon resistance. Poor UV and ozone resistance — keep it out of sunlight.
Natural rubber for elasticity
Vibration isolation, high-elasticity applications, some tyre and industrial components. Great mechanical properties, poor chemical and UV resistance.
Silicone rubber (HCR) for bridge cases
Higher-durometer silicone supplied as a solid gum, moulded like other rubbers. Bridges the gap where the environment needs silicone but the geometry suits compression.
TPE family
Three things TPE is good at.
Injection-mouldable like plastic
Runs on thermoplastic injection presses. Faster cycle times, lower tooling cost per cavity, easier colour changes than any thermoset.
Recyclable at end of life
Unlike silicone and thermoset rubbers, TPE can be re-melted and re-moulded. Increasingly important for consumer product sustainability posture.
Overmoulds cleanly onto rigid plastic
Good for soft-touch handles, grips, and seals on plastic housings. Not usually right for high-temperature or long-life applications.
In practice
Four common OEM scenarios.
Outdoor sealing gasket
EPDM (rubber family) usually. Silicone only if the temperature range demands it.
Fuel or oil interface
Nitrile (rubber family). Silicone is generally the wrong answer here — it swells in hydrocarbons.
Consumer product with soft-touch grip
TPE if the product runs on plastic injection presses anyway; silicone if the sensitivity of the application demands it (e.g. medical adjacent).
Keep reading
More guides from the workshop.
Designing a part for volume from the start
Most silicone parts are designed by someone who's designed one before. If this is your first, or if the last one taught you…
Read the guidePost-processing silicone — what happens after the press opens
A moulded part isn't always a finished part. Understanding what happens between the press and the shipment helps you specify the…
Read the guideColour matching and batch consistency
For anything a customer will see, colour is one of the two things they judge (feel is the other). Getting the colour right is…
Read the guideDesigned and developed in the UK. UK moulding capability, with some higher-volume production placed with trusted partners where that's the right commercial answer.
Get in touch
Tell us the part, the volume, and the timeline.
Rough annual volume, target unit price, and any deadlines. That's enough to work out whether compression, LSR injection or something else is the right tool.
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