Originally Posted by
haaseg
I'm skeptical of this whole moisture wicking phenom in clothes lately. Sure, it keeps you dry, fine. But the whole purpose of sweat in the first place is for the cooling affect of evaporation. If the moisture is just wicked away before it evaporates, you don't get the cooling affect. Seems to me that the body would just keep producing even more sweat to try to cool down.
It works because it's simple physics... The wicking fabric pulls sweat off your skin through capillary action. Then the moisture in the fabric effects evaporative cooling, and in some cases can be more efficient than just sweat on skin because the increased surface area of the microfiber wicking fabric allows for greater evaporation than the more limited surface area of your skin. This can sometimes be more apparent on the bike as the effective headwind evaporates the moisture from the fabric rapidly. You can experience this directly if you wear arm warmers on a warm day: if you squirt water on the arm warmers and ride, your arms can actually feel cooler than if you just squirted water on bare arms and rode.
This may not be as effective when it comes to socks encased in not-very-breatheable shoes however... Different people may have different experiences with socks. While I don't hate cotton socks, wool or wicking tech fabric socks feel more comfortable to me. YMMV