How to recognise genuine leather

Recommendations and tips on how to know the real skin. Photos of animal skin under a microscope.

Summary: You can only feel a small part of genuine dyed leather (correctly called "leather") or high-quality faux leather. Touch and smell will help you the most.

Internet advice or a microscope is usually not helpful in distinguishing true skin. Mixed plastic and animal scent can indicate a combination of genuine and synthetic leather, but also genuine dyed leather. Real leather (even dyed leather) smells like burnt hair when burnt by fire.

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Leather treatments in the final stage of production

The bagger buys undyed, unstained, freshly scented processed leather (leather) in a larger whole. This can be recognised quite easily by the senses even under a microscope. Real leather under a microscope. The first picture from the left is the undyed calfskin top side. The next 3 are the dyed top sides of the leather. The last 2 pictures are the reverse – suede side.

However, the end customer usually receives heavily dyed leather or a lower inferior layer of leather with an artificially embossed realistic surface or even waste shredded leather pressed into imitation leather.

Crushed genuine leather combined with artificial top

A lot of skins marked as genuine are just waste shreds of faux leather on a plastic backing. These leathers are very poor quality and unpleasant to the touch. Slegally “fiber leather” or “reconstituted” leather (also elsewhere “PU leather”, “split leather”, “faust leather”, “bonded leather”). Sometimes they are incorrectly called genuine leather, sometimes synthetic leather or PVC. For us, basic artificial leather.

Combined basic artificial skin under the microscope

Strong colour hides and enhances the real skin

We prefer less dyed leather even at the cost of less water protection. Many manufacturers degrade the leather with a thick layer of paint so that it looks artificial. In the case of heavily dyed leather, the paint covers the texture on the cheek to such an extent that it is impossible to determine with certainty whether the leather is genuine or artificial. 

A similar final image of irregular hair-like fibers can be created by thin genuine lamb or calf leather, which is approximately 0.5 mm. Due to its regular structure, when colored, the surface feels clearly artificial at first glance. On the reverse side, you can see a basically regular, very fine suede. It looks like microplush or other artificial material.... When you smell some of these genuine leathers - especially where you can't get to the reverse side - you don't smell anything. But with some, you can clearly identify genuine leather by their distinct smell.

Relatively reliable criteria for the recognition of synthetic leather and genuine leather regardless of treatment

Flame – some artificial leathers bubble and crackle in the flame of a lighter (3-5 seconds) and smell like plastic when burning. A strong flame for a few seconds will not damage the leather, whether it is on the front or back, but it will make light leather unwashable. A flame of 7 seconds will damage even thick leather.  Thin 0.5mm calfskin curls instantly and ignites after about 2 seconds.

Unlike plastic, real leather will never start to boil or bubble. Burnt real leather smells just like burnt hair. Sometimes you can smell it when it burns, sometimes when you wipe the burned area with a wet finger.  Leather should only be flame tested on the top side (ideally with the back covered for a small piece). In the case of artificial leather, the back may be genuine leather...:).

Disadvantages: damage to synthetic and genuine leather, ignorance of chemical treatment and colour of genuine and synthetic leather

Criteria for the recognition of genuine skin with limited functionality

Scents

Genuine leather characteristically smells only undyed, possibly stained on the cheek and reverse (if the reverse is not impregnated with chemicals). For products composed partly of genuine and synthetic leather, or for products made of semi-soft the skin you feel predominantly plastic or paint or other chemical and slightly and skin at a time. You can often feel the same or nothing with heavily dyed genuine leather.

The absence of scent means artificial leather or heavily coloured or chemically treated, in our opinion degraded, genuine leather.

Tactile, withCancer and intuition

Often they will also label genuine dyed leather as fake. You will identify good quality genuine or synthetic leather and also poor quality genuine or synthetic leather. However, you often cannot tell genuine dyed leather from quality faux leather. You can usually tell the smooth face and suede reverse of faux leather by feel.

Adhesive, solvent and chemical analysis

The joining of strips of quality leather (genuine or synthetic) is usually done by stitching. Glue is the hallmark of cheap artificial leather. It sticks together so that the reverse side, which is sometimes artificial to the eye, is not visible.

The plastic should dissolve in the solvent and the leather should not. We haven't checked. We haven't tried any of the chemical analysis procedures. That doesn't make sense to a layman.

Microscope

A good magnification for observing is 10-70x. This can handle the cheapest microscopes. Overhead artificial lighting will help. Cheap microscopes tend to have only lower illumination or no illumination at all. Higher resolution is no longer helpful to the amateur or the more complete picture disappears.

Artificial leather is said to have a regular pattern and texture without wrinkles or embossing. There are artificial skins with a rather irregular structure with irregular pores even in one direction (as is usual with genuine leather). Some synthetic leathers have regular long microfibres on the reverse. Unlike real microfibres, they look like small regular lines. These can be easily identified as synthetic under a microscope.

Often the leather is not only dyed, but a pattern can be embossed into it by pressure. Or a lower, lower-quality layer of leather is used, or even pieces of waste leather pressed into a belt. So you often don't see the top side of the leather, but basically a side cut - then it looks like a mess of tissue and fibers. So an amateur with a microscope doesn't have much chance of finding their way around.

Skin structure

You won't see the relatively very thin upper part of the skin - the skin - in leather (i.e. in tanned leather in the store) because it is removed during tanning.

Upper papillary part

Under the skin is the less valuable part of the skin – the dermis. The upper papillary part of the dermis is thinner than the lower part in most animals. It contains hair papillae and collagen fibers. The collagen fibers are so dense that even under a microscope of 20-100x they form a continuous mass. Pores (hair papillae) often have an oblique direction to one side (hair direction).

Genuine processed hides (i.e. leather) e.g. cow, sheep, pig, goat are quite different from each other even from the point of view of an amateur observer. There is also a big difference between the skin of a baby animal and that of an adult. E.g. very high quality white calfskin (undyed) may have the appearance of snow (very regular, uniform, without scars and wrinkles) with pits from hair papillae inclined in one direction of the hair.

Beef toThe skin on the cheek looks like a kind of pouches over each other or apple pie (peeling cells). The cowhide looks similar on the reverse when tanned, there are irregular chipped pouches tapering into bundles of fibers (visually more like scraps or chips) and finally very irregular and very short fibers. This highest quality layer (the upper part of the skin) is used to produce so-called “grain leather”.

Lower reticular part

In the lower reticular part there are relatively loosely laid and intertwined fibers made of the protein collagen. Fat cells penetrate into them from the subcutaneous tissue. In English, the term “genuine” leather is used for products from this part. Under a microscope, at a magnification of 50-100x, it looks like irregular lines intertwined with each other, but with relatively large gaps compared to the thickness of the fiber, occasionally covered with fat droplets of various sizes.

Suede leather is made from this layer (the lower part of the skin). Towards the surface, the collagen fibers (“hairs”) rise vertically and thicken so that they are visible as scraps or chips. There are various treatments of genuine and artificial leather and their combinations beyond our knowledge. For example, in very thin leather, where when you scrape off the thin layer of the surface, you immediately encounter loose collagen fibers of the lower skin. This lower “suede part” is sometimes cut lengthwise from the upper, higher quality part. Its surface is strengthened, smoothed and dyed by pressure and chemistry so that it resembles the higher quality upper skin.

The lowest layer of raw skin is the subcutaneous connective tissue, whose function is to protect and insulate the underlying muscle. The layer consists mainly of fat cells.

Completely non-functional criteria to distinguish between dyed genuine leather and synthetic leather

The face (upper side) of the right and wrong skin is sometimes on both sides

Artificial leather can have a cheek on both sides and real leather is either smooth on the front and more or less suede on the reverse or suede on both sides. Even genuine leather is sometimes exceptionally for aesthetic reasons, wrap them inside or over each other so that neither the reverse nor the side of the reverse is visible.

Soak water after a few minutes.

Applies to untreated leather only. Impregnated or heavily dyed leather does not absorb.

Strength and wrinkledof genuine leather.

The skin is often cut into multiple layers. Good quality leather does not have to be thick. A good quality thinned calf or lamb skin can be as thin as 0.5 mm. The thinnest artificial skins with a covered back are about 0.3 mm. On the other hand, our thickest slicks are 1cm thick (two 0.5mm leather sewn together).

Some genuine and synthetic leathers will wrinkle when bent and others will not. Same with creaking.

Price and tag, manufacturer's description or leather mark on the product

With a belt for a few tens of crowns or a jacket for a few hundred we don't consider real leather. We have seen expensive faux leather or genuine leather degraded by heavy dyeing and varnishing. The criterion of price is also not very helpful in recognising quality leather. The tag is pcrucially meaningless. For example, a strap or some small part can be made of real leather and everything else can be made of artificial leather.

We recommend undyed or stained genuine leather or synthetic leather

In BDSM we can safely indulge in the natural luxury of undyed or stained leather (lightly dyed). We don't usually drag them out in the rain etc like a handbag.  The strong colour covers the texture and smell of the leather. With a strong colour there is not much difference between genuine and quality synthetic leather.

We also see room for cheap synthetic leather. But combining a real leather belt with a faux leather belt doesn't make sense.