Although a negative Poisson's ratio ( that is, a lateral extension in response to stretching) is not forbidden by thermodynamics, for almost all common materials the Poisson's ratio is positive. In 1987, Lakes first discovered negative Poisson's ratio effect in polyurethane (PU) foam with re-entrant structures, which was named anti-rubber, auxetic, and dilatational by later researchers. In this paper, the term 'auxetic' will be used. Since then, investigation on the auxetic materials has held major interest, focusing on finding more materials with negative Poisson's ratio, and on examining the mechanisms, properties and applications. Therefore, more materials were found to have the counter-intuitive effect of auxeticity due to different structural or microstructrual mechanisms. The present article reviews the latest advances in auxetic materials, their structural mechanisms, performance and applications. (C) 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers.