Imagine you’ve just bought a beautiful leather bag and you can’t wait to flaunt it to the whole world, because a well-made leather bag signals class, taste and persona. You carry it proudly to your next outing with friends. While admiring your new acquisition, one of your friends tells you that the bag is not made using full-grain leather but using PU. You feel slighted, duped and your whole world comes crumbling down. Fret not, we’re here to help.
The market is flooded with bags which look like leather but are not leather. They are made using a petroleum product called polyurethane or PU. Over the years, marketers have given it easier and more sellable names like leatherette, pleather, faux leather, synthetic leather, vegan leather etc. It is made to imitate full-grain leather at a fraction of the cost, and is hard to differentiate.
It also helps to know that ‘leather’ covers several grades. Full-grain keeps the outermost grain layer intact and is the grade we work in. Top-grain has been sanded back a little. Corrected-grain has been sanded further and given a printed finish. Bonded leather is offcuts ground down and glued to a backing. PU is not on that scale at all: it is a plastic film on a fabric base.
Whether you buy a full-grain leather bag or a PU bag, as a customer, it’s your right to know exactly what you’re buying so you can take the right decision regarding the price and quality of the product.
Here are some major differences between products made using PU and full-grain leather:
Surface: Leather is a natural material and hence has an imperfect surface. The surface of a product made using full-grain leather has irregular grains on it. However, in order to confuse people, some PU manufacturers print lines and wrinkles that mimic those grains. So to tell a PU product from a full-grain leather one all you need to do is; bend it. A full-grain leather product will form wrinkles while PU will remain smooth and will have a plastic feeling.
Smell: Full-grain leather products have a peculiar smell, like when you buy a new car with leather seats on it. PU products smell somewhat like plastic. So all you need to do is smell, smell, smell.
Water Test: This is another good way of testing whether a product is made using full-grain leather or not. A full-grain leather product will absorb the water droplet in seconds while the water droplet on PU will just lie there as it is sitting on plastic. This is probably the easiest way to find out which of the two you are buying.
Fire Test: Now, we’re not saying that you light a product on fire in a Zara outlet and get arrested. But in the spirit of providing a differentiator test, we’ll just go ahead and tell you. A full-grain leather patch resists flame and simply chars and curls at the edge, whereas PU catches fire readily and smells of burning plastic. We suggest that its best you refrain from doing this test.
Price: Full-grain leather is usually more expensive than PU. Besides the novelty value of being a natural material, full-grain leather goes through a lot of cleaning and tanning processes before it reaches the final state. This is a lengthy process which requires considerable resources.
Strength: Full-grain leather is way stronger than faux leather and hence much more durable.
Leather is among the most counterfeited products across the globe and people usually don’t know how to tell PU from the real thing, thus they end up paying more for a product made using petroleum derivatives which otherwise has a similar appearance (enough to fool us). There are many companies like Outback, Nappa Dori, Fossil etc which make products using full-grain leather and don’t dupe the customer. We hope that you wouldn’t fall in the marketers' trap next time you go out buying a “leather” bag.
0 comments