 full grain, corrected grain, suede, rough out. Are you confused about the different types of leathers on boots? Or more to the point, are you confused about the terms used in describing the leathers on boots? Well keep watching friend, here is the Leather Deep Dive. Hi you guys, welcome to my channel Bootlossophy and my name is Tech. I acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands that I'm recording on the widget people. In this video I'm going to talk about leather, the different types of leather and especially try to untangle the different terms people use to describe different leathers. But I'm warning you my voice is going to be a little nasally in this video and I might even sniff. I'm just coming out of COVID. Still we soldier on. Before we start let's get this straight though. I am not a leather expert. I trained in numbers as an accountant and I run a management consulting company. So hardly the man to have grown up in tannery's knee deep in the tanning vat. But I do have an interest in the different leathers used by boot brands and intrigued by the different things that they call these leathers. And so when I started my boot journey I was super confused when people talked about a leather being full grain and it obviously did not look like another leather on another video that someone else called full grain. And then the comments on the videos and on Reddit which I think shows that people really either cannot agree on terms or just did not realize what those terms really meant. So I investigated and this video puts together the consensus understanding not the universal understanding the consensus understanding of these leather terms. Second caveat this video is not about different tannages. That's a video that could take 30 or 40 hours going through the different tannages made by different leather tannery's around the world. No this video is about the different types of leather used for boots. And to help me explain I'm going to use some graphic aids just like play school. To explain the different types of leather we need to start with the whole hide. So here's this brilliantly drawn characterization of the cross-section of a typical hide. At the top of course is hair growing out of the layer that we call the grain layer. The grain layer has skin cells that make up really tightly packed fibers. Essentially a protective first layer for the animal. Just under that is the junction between the grain and the next layer down the corium. The junction between the grain and the corium has skin cells that make up fibers that are starting to open up, starting to allow the animal to flex and bend. Beneath that is the corium layer with much looser fibers as it starts to become less skin and more flesh. And then of course below that is the actual flesh of the animal itself. Now when a hide is first tanned to preserve it and stop it rotting it has all of these layers present. Even a little bit of flesh that's still attached when the animal is skinned. Ya, yuck, gross but that's life folks. So the first thing that happens after the hide is preserved is that it's cleaned up and the hairs as well as any flesh are removed. You like that? I told you this was like play school. Only a bloodier gross adult version. Stick with me. A lot of people make the mistake that what's left is referred to as full grain. In fact someone actually once commented on one of my videos about a boot that I'd reviewed which was a full grain leather boot that he liked it but he wouldn't buy it because it wasn't thick enough to be full grain. Well if you made a boot from the leather that's left here you'd be making a moon boot. This leather is too thick. They do use the full piece but usually to make saddles and other things that don't flex a lot. The fact that the top layer is called the grain layer should give you a clue because full grain leather simply means leather where the top is not treated or corrected by buffing or sanding in any way. This is Parkhurst's Allen Boot and it uses Horween's full grain Dublin leather. Check out the review showing in the top corner. You can tell that it's full grain leather because if you look closely you can see all the crisscross texture of the fibers, the hair holes, the pores, often scratches from barbed wire, tick bite marks and so on. So full grain refers to how this top layer is treated. But as I said this is too thick to make practical boots so in fact most leathers are split. The cleaned up hide is run through a roller with a horizontal blade that splits the hide into two pieces either just above or around the junction of the Corrieman grain or it can be just below as well. The top of the split is sent to make certain types of leathers primarily the smooth surface leathers and the bottom of the split is used to make primarily suede. Now before I go on let me briefly point out how genuine leather is not. Well it is but it's not. What the industry calls genuine leather is usually the bottom split which they then sand the rough nappy fibers at the top smooth and then print. Yes print a grain pattern on it. Genuine leather smells funny that's how you can tell. It's the ink and dye smells overpowering and your remaining leather smells. Stay away from it. So let's go back to our picture of full grain leather. As I said full grain means you haven't stuffed around with the surface of the grain but for some designs this isn't really dressy enough and you do need to either really polish it with a lot of waxes to make it look dressy like some calfskin leathers for example in dress shoes or dressier boots. Think of something like RM Williams calfskin or you correct it. Correcting the grain means you lightly buff it to remove the tick bites and other marks but you leave most of the pores and grain. This is the Ellen Edmonds Higgins mill in brown chrome excel. It surprised you to hear that technically while described as full grain chrome excel is actually corrected. It is slightly smoothed out so as to give it this kind of smooth luster. So the debate is can you mean full grain with this kind of light correction? Many would say yes because again full grain is the treatment of the surface and something as light as this doesn't really stuff it up. There are other corrected leathers where it's treated a lot heavier than this and common understanding is that those are no longer full grain. Who recognizes this icon? Of course Timberlands classic six inch waterproof yellow boot. Many of you will know that this is new buck but many might think that new buck is a kind of suede but it's not. New buck is actually corrected grain leather. So new buck starts with a piece of full grain leather. The grain is then heavily corrected that means the whole top surface is sanded and then buffed until these tight fibres in the grain layer start to feel a velvety smooth feel. It's almost too short to be called a nap but it's the feeling of the fibres starting to stand up. Why do this? Because new buck is incredibly resilient. While it still has the tight fibre structure to protect it against cuts the abrasion that removes the smooth grain has made the surface resilient to scratches which would show on a smooth grain surface. That's why it's so popular as a work boot leather and the tanning of it can vary. Apart from a straight dry new buck you can also apply some oil in the tanning and create a distressed look like on this Chippewa original service boot. Now this is a leather called crazy horse. It's not horse it's just a name and it's made as an oiled new buck. You can see other variations that the P&W brands often called distressed. Again is new buck full grain? I mean some brands call their new buck distressed leather full grain. It still has most of the grain layer lots of tight fibres but in my mind it's probably only a subset of full grain. Okay now so let's talk about suede. Yes it is different from new buck. Suede as a term can be controversial because it can be some things to some people. Let me explain. Once the hide is split you can make suede from both splits. The more traditional split is the bottom split. The top surface of the split is sanded so finely as to make semi-loose fibres into a soft nappy surface. The best proponent of suede is of course Charles F. Stead. This is Weiberg's Hulk at boot. It's instead Janus Carth suede probably the softest most velvety suede yet. See the review that's linked in the corner right now. When treated well its surface of the suede is soft and it just plays with the light. It's also incredibly supple on your feet. But don't get me wrong not all suede is as soft as this. Some other tanneries can make good suede but they're often rougher with a little bit more net than the velvet touch. But one of the controversial things about the suede is that it can be made from both splits. Apart from the bottom split suede can also be made from the top split. In this case the top layer is turned upside down and the bottom of the top split is sanded to make the suede. This often results in not as fine a nap. Now this is predominantly used in British shoe making that's why if you look at the British brands on their websites you'll often see a reference to rough out suede which brings us to rough out. From the name you should be able to guess that rough out is literally the rough side out. So rough out boots have this smooth grain side on the inside and the looser fibre structure on the outside. This is the Cordobus capto boot review coming soon. It's a Mexican tan rough out and you can see the nappiness in it. So clearly not a suede because it's not been finely sanded and not intended for finer looks. They are great workbook leathers though because like newbuck they are resilient to cuts, knots and scratches. And for the other guy who commented that my Indonesian rough out boots were not full grain look again. The full grain is on the inside. Now I said earlier that I wasn't going into different tannages and only sticking with different types of leather but I will talk about wax suede and wax rough outs. Now technically they are how you tan and treat those leathers but I will speak about them to clear some confusion. Wax flash is rough out with a heavy coat of wax stuck on the napp smoothing it down. Here's Truman's Java wax flesh boot. The wax flesh from Horween is a mid brown rough out leather that has a thick coating of wax. When new it looks almost smooth grain. Check out the pull loop here. But once it's worn and kicked around the wax layer starts to flake off and reveals the mid brown napp of the rough out underneath and it gets quite beautiful. This one is Caswell's Lisbon boot in suede tobacco waxy commander. You can watch the review of this one on the link at the corner. Again they make this by coating suede with a layer of wax but the difference is that it's not a thick layer so even when new it never looks glossy smooth and it wears off quickly almost with your first steps as you start to crease the boot. In fact I sold another pair of these on eBay just the wrong size after only wearing it for a video shoot and one guy who knew it was me selling wrote to me and said now you're telling fibs no way it looks like that worn after a video shoot. Well he was wrong or probably he thought that wax suede was like wax flesh. Wax flesh has the thick layer of wax on rough out napp that was designed as a work boot leather so designed to be difficult to flake off. It takes a while to get it to this stage. Wax suede on the other hand was designed as a casual leather designed to start showing the suede napp very quickly especially with the ginger undertones of this tobacco suede. I hope all my viewers live and learn. So there you go even more confused. I hope not. Let me just re-emphasize some people use these terms and affix slightly different meanings to these terms. Those differences are caused by the fact that unlike any other science there is no agreed dictionary of terms that the whole leather industry uses. The differences are often caused by nationality, Europe calling things a different thing from America, tradition and dare I say some internet extract that someone once latched on to and then repeat it and like all things internet to some sector it became the gospel truth. Anyway I hope you enjoyed that rather strange segue from boot reviews. If you did enjoy it you know what to do click on like to help my channel out and tell me if you like more of this content and I want to really emphasize the majority of viewers who keep coming back to watch the videos are not subscribed to my channel. Go figure. If all of you regular viewers actually did subscribe my subscriber numbers would go wild so really please subscribe. I'll even bring you boot reviews. Until the next time when you subscribe do take care and I'll see you again soon.