Can I dye something permanently with coffee or tea?

I am only able to buy clothes online.  I bought something that only came in white.

That is one of the colors that I hate.

Will coffee or teas permanently dye something?

I hate to ruin something that I just bought for a lot of money.

Anne Miller wrote:I am only able to buy clothes online.  I bought something that only came in white.

That is one of the colors that I hate.

Will coffee or teas permanently dye something?

I hate to ruin something that I just bought for a lot of money.

I would love the answer to this as well.

I suspect the materials will matter.

What is it made out of?  (say cotton, say cotton, say cotton lol)

I would imagine it would work out pretty well with natural fibers!

Make a soup pot load of tea/coffee and boil it down a bit. You are making a dye so the color is important. Use a good amount of tea/coffee. Once it cools down a bit to handle

Add 1 part white distilled vinegar to 4 parts dye water to open the fibers up and soak it for an hour. Don't crowd the fabric, it might not come out an even stain if you do.

I've done this with a test bit of cloth, not a shirt and have had good results.

Edit - This link explains it better but same process I used. https://woodlarkblog.com/natural-dyeing-with-tea/

Will it add colour - absolutely.  The colour will last for several washes.

But here we get nitpicky

Coffee and tea stains the cloth.  To dye the cloth, we need a mineral to act as a go-between.  Think of it as false teeth to help the colour bite into the cloth.  This is usually called a mordent (thus the teeth metaphor).  

If this is cotton or linen, tannin acts as a partial mordant.  Tea and coffee have loads of tannen so this is a good step.  However, if we want the colour to last well in the light and wash, adding a mineral like alum (available for cheap in the garden supply shop but is also available as a food additive (think pickles) or from a dye supplier) will help.  

The worry for me is the temperature.  We usually boil cloth to dye it but some clothing is held together with synthetic thread that doesn't do well in those conditions.  I wonder is solar dyeing is an option where you are?  

we did a lot of this in college using tea and coffee, it lasted a few washes. the clothes will never be white-white again, but the color will fade. worked well for drama club sort of applications.

if you have herb teas with hibiscus, you may get beyond just the beige tint.

I dye a lot of my clothes, and I use the stuff in the fabric store, because that is what I have access to here (occasionally I'll do something weird with herbs, but most of the time what i want is black or navy blue).
The composition of the fabrics and threads can have some unexpected effects at times (I had certain panels of a bra come out purple while the rest came out black, for example-- the t shirt in the link Timothy posted is another good example). It can be weird to have the whole thing be dark blue and then the (synthetic) thread screaming white, for example, but on the whole it almost always works out okay.
If I were you I'd try the coffee or tea. You can always dye again darker, so when it washes out, you could try again darker or with something else.

When we lived in MN we died cotton curtains with tea.  Our objective was to get a color that was closer to beige and not the WHITE the curtains we had were.  It worked, but we were not very fussy about the outcome.