IDENTIFICATION OF NATURAL LEATHER, ARTIFICIAL LEATHER, RECYCLED LEATHER

First of all, we must understand the concept of these three kinds of leather.

1.Recycled leather, also named leather paperboard. Actually, it's not the real paper at the traditional meaning. It's made of the scrapped leather after the processes of  water washing, softening, grinding, adding adhesive, etc.in the leather manufacturers, that's the reason why we call them leather paperboard, which being used in leather production, carton production, etc.. 

2.Generally, the artificial leather is not air permeable, which being coated by polyvinyl chloride, polyurethane and so on, whose backing is made up of fabric and woolen cloth. However, the artificial leather production technology is becoming mature by the progress of science and technology. Its quality has greatly improved no matter on the air permeability, softness, hand feeling, appearance or other many aspects, especially in the imitation of natural leather, which being highly similar with the natural leather, even reaching the effect of hard distinguishing. Hence, many foreign animal protection organizations advocate people to wear clothing of artificial leather and oppose using the natural leather.

3.Natural leather is made by the skin of animals after processing, grinding, softening and dyeing, which means the real leather. Many brand owners choose to use it although it's the most expensive. Therefore, the leather series of those big international brands are the luxuries.

So how can we distinguish them? Now the artificial leather craft has been very high-skilled, that's the reason why we need to differentiate them carefully to avoid buying any fake leather products with unmatched prices, unless needing the artificial leather by yourself.

Visual identification method, identify from the design, the skin pores, etc. You can find them evenly existed on the surface of natural leather, just like the natural distribution of people's skin. Its cutting section is with obvious levels, and there's animal tissue fiber at the bottom. If scraping it with your fingernails, you will feel the raising of the leather fiber, even some may fall down. For the artificial leather, its backing is fabric, neither no animal tissue fiber nor skin pores. However, some even have unobvious imitative skin pores and design or very regular both the two.  While for the recycled leather, although some have brokenly shorter animal tissue fiber, yet no any natural design or skin pores existed on its surface.

Hand-feeling identification method, the natural leather is quite flexible because it has a natural fiber structure. Fold the front of natural leather down about 90 degrees, it appears natural folds. You will find uneven quantity and thickness of folds existed when bending its different parts respectively, then it can be basically identified as the natural leather. While the resilience of artificial leather is bad whose hand feeling just like the plastic, its quantity and thickness of folds are similar no matter being folded down from any directions.

Smelling identification method, the natural leather has a very strong fur smell even though after processing. However, the artificial leather products don't have the smell of fur but plastic. You can identify from their smelling and status of ash by burning some samples. Usually, the natural leather burn into the easy broken powder with the smell of fur burning. Whereas for the other artificial leather, they shrink rapidly with more burning flame and terrible smell of plastic. And they will be adhesive after burning but hard into blocks after cooling. You mainly differentiate them by hand feeling and design when buying the clothes because you are unable to burn them certainly. 

Finally, freezing &heating method as a folk one introduced here. The hand feeling of natural leather don't have any change whatever the environmental temperatures change. However, for the other artificial leather, they become hard under the freezing condition and fairly softer under light heating. It's a little difficult for the ordinary consumers to use this method.