Leather and faux leather are both commonly used material in furniture industry. Specially, when it comes to custom made furniture, the selection of material will largely affect the cost as well as the durability of the furniture. Thus, this article will try to offer some useful tips while choosing this kind of material.
Leather
Leather, or we can call it ‘genuine leather’ or ‘full leather’. In furniture industry, while we are talking about the genuine leather, we normally will refer to top-layer or first layer leather. In other words, it is the leather that comes directly from animal, such as ox, sheep, pig, etc.
Genuine leather contains 3 parts, dermis layer, fibrous tissue layer & villus layer. And this is the base standard to tell if this material is a king of leather or not.
Faux Leather
Faux leather is the general name for those material who has the similar appreance or feeling of the genuine leather. Normally, they are made with 2 different material as below:
- Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC).
- Polyurethane (PU).
From the development of the faux leather material, we can divide it into 3 generations:
- PVC. This is the 1st generation of faux leather. Mainly, it is PVC material putting on a fabric layer with plasticizers and stabilizers within 200 degrees. The biggest advantage is hard and stable and disadvantage is weaking in twisting and folding. Now, it is not very common used for furniture industry except those chair that requires hard and thick leather (see picture below).
2. PU. This is the 2nd generation of faux leather. The structure of the PU leather is more or leathe teh same as PVC leather. The main difference is change from PVC material to PU. It is soft and has a high tenacity, thus, it has been largely used in furniture, clothing as well as luggage industries.
3. Micro Strengthen PU. This is the 3rd generation of faux leather. The biggest different between normal PU is, the base layer is formed of mirco fiber, which makes it close to the genuine leather and has a better breathability.
Easy way to tell leather from faux leather
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- Smell. Genuine leather has a smell of animal tallow while faux leather is just a smell of plastic.
- Appearance. The grain of genuine leather is irregular while faux leather is a regular one.
- Feeling of touch. Leather would not have a sense of ‘cold’ feeling under low tempreture while faxu leather turns to be hard and ‘cold’.
About the structure and methods that we can use to differ leather from faux leather, hopefully it can be helpful in choosing this kind of material. If you have greate ideas, you’re welcome to share with us!