How to recognize true leather: 5 tips to avoid mistakes

The quality of the materials for us is essentia, we select bags just from best artisans in Tuscany.

But how do you understand when a product is made with genuine leather?

Many of the tricks to understand it are related to our senses, like touch and smell. In fact, true leather is easily recognizable by touch, you feel a typical feeling of warmth; Furthermore has a pleasant and unmistakable smell, far away from plastic or other synthetic material. Ok, but what if we can’t touch the skin with our hands and maybe we want to buy it online?

To be sure one must rely on sight, one of our most important senses, with the help by a pinch of cunning. Let's see 5 simple tricks to avoid mistakes and recognize the real leather:

1. Look carefully at the photos. Genuine leather has a "natural" appearance, an irregular pattern that makes visible the irregularities of the pores. If the appearance is too smooth, regular, too defined, it may not be real leather.

2. Look at the imperfections. Imperfections are a good sign: creases, wrinkles, small marks, they are all evidence that it is real leather. Then depends on the type of leather and the type of processing. But a not too "fake" aspect is positive, even if today the producers have become very good in imitating the typical irregularity of real leather.

3. Aren’t the photos enough? Ask for more photos. To check the quality of the product by not testing it with your hand you can ask the seller for more photos. This you will allow to better examine the leather and also to have a confirmation of the reliability of the seller.

4. Ask for the type of leather. If the product description remains vague, ask for more information. Contact the seller and ask for confirmation that it is genuine leather, and above all what kind of leather, how it has been worked and what are its characteristics. They are all information that should be written on the site, as well as being on the bag label.

5. Considered the price. The price makes the difference because a genuine leather bag can never be cheap. This depends on the fact that the purchase prices of the leather are always higher; if we consider that 1 square meter of leather can have costs ranging from € 40 to € 150 it is easy to understand how a bag made of high quality leather can not have a price lower than the purchase price. It is necessary to consider that to produce a medium-sized bag, it is necessary to use about a whole leather, as said before, it isn’t cheap at all. In addition to this we must add that the artisan bags like those we selected, they are created by hand by our best craftsmen who are part of the leather district; this involves labor costs that are absolutely different from those of industrial production.

We understand that a product so valuable for the use of quality material and for the craftsmanship of the processing is more appreciated once you have physically in front of you, but we hope that through our advice it will be easier to appreciate them also in photos.