Pashmina is one of the most abused words in textiles. It's printed on five-pound scarves in airport shops and on five-hundred-pound ones in boutiques, and a good number of both contain no pashmina at all. So it's worth saying plainly what the word actually means.
The fibre
Pashmina is cashmere, a particular and very fine kind. It comes from the Changthangi goat, which lives on the Changthang plateau in Ladakh, in the Indian Himalaya, at around four to five thousand metres. To survive winters that hit minus forty, the goat grows a downy undercoat, and that down is combed out each spring. The word comes from *pashm*, Persian for the soft under-fleece. It's the same high-mountain, hand-combed craft we tell the story of on our Roots page.
What sets it apart is how fine it is, roughly 12 to 16 microns, finer than most cashmere, which is itself far finer than sheep's wool. That fineness is the whole point. It's why true pashmina feels like almost nothing and still keeps you warm.
Why the word means so little
Here's the catch: in most countries "pashmina" has no legal definition. Anyone can write it on a label. So the market filled up with scarves that are viscose, or silk-and-viscose, or a whisper of cashmere stretched with a lot of something cheaper, all sold as pashmina. The word became a *style*, a thin draped scarf, rather than a fibre.
A rough rule: if a "pashmina" is cheap, glossy, and tells you nothing about what's in it, it almost certainly isn't one.
What ours is, and why we say so
We use the word carefully. When we say Pashmina, we mean a blend, 30% pashmina and 70% lamb's wool, and we put that on the page, because hiding it would make us part of the problem. Our handwoven Pashmina is built that way on purpose. The pashmina brings the softness, the lamb's wool brings body and durability, and the blend costs a fraction of pure pashmina while still feeling like the real thing, because part of it is. If you want the wider comparison, we've set wool against cashmere too.
Pure pashmina, the 100% fibre, exists as the step above. It's finer, lighter and more delicate, and it's priced accordingly. Both are honest. They're just different jobs.
The test for any pashmina, ours included, is whether the seller will tell you exactly what's in it. If they will, you can decide. If they won't, that's your answer. Our full notes on fibre and care are in the Guide to SHAAL.