The question of the naturalness of the material worries every customer when he purchases leather goods. Modern manufacturers own technologies that result in the use of material that is difficult to distinguish from high-quality raw materials. Before you go shopping, a person needs to possess at least a minimum of knowledge in this area: what genuine leather looks like , what split leathers are , how to distinguish them from each other.
Skinning
In the leather industry, a leather processing process is used, which is called sanding, or lamination. As a result, the workpiece being processed is divided into parts, layers. There can be a different amount - from 3 to 6. It all depends on the original skin thickness and the settings of the mechanism that performs this work.
Now it’s easy to guess what split is. This is the part of the skin resulting from the process of its lamination. Most often, the mentioned term still refers to the middle layer.
Using different layers of skin
Having understood what a split is, you need to know how to use it. What kind of production is each layer suitable for?
- The upper, front layer is, in fact, genuine high-quality leather.
- From the middle and the core - after a certain treatment - the same material is obtained, but with lower quality characteristics.
- A split velor is made from the leather layer of the skin. He goes to the manufacture of shoes or parts thereof, workwear, mittens, gloves.
- Mezdra (the lowest layer) and the trimmings that remain after the production of the split are used for the manufacture of glue, technical gelatin and other substances.
What is split leather, was known in ancient times. So, for example, it was he, as the purest material, that was used by the ancient Jewish people to write the Mezuzah (part of the text of the prayer).
Split processing methods
There are several ways to process the split leather, but two of them are used most often.
The first is that the manufacturers of raw materials recreate the naturalness of the skin pattern on the upper layer of the split. To do this, it is treated with special resins or varnishes. Outwardly, such a material is difficult to distinguish from genuine leather, but it cannot be assigned to this category, since chemical processing means were used in the production. A split treated in this way is usually called semi-natural skin.
Having become acquainted with the second method of manufacturing the material, you can understand what a natural split is.
To obtain it, the outer surface of a piece of leather is treated under suede or velor. Chemicals during this treatment are used minimally, and the resulting raw materials can be classified as natural materials.
But a split-velor or suede has one significant drawback: the material is too “delicate”, it allows water to pass through and does not have wear resistance. To extend the service life of such raw materials, to improve its performance, the external surface of the skin layers still have to be treated with special chemical compounds. But the name of the natural split for this type of material is fixed.
Reasons for the popularity of such products
The products of shoe and haberdashery factories made of split leather are in demand among buyers. Recently, the demand for such goods is even increasing. There are several reasons for this.
- The first of them lies in the fact that the products have affordable prices, in comparison with things made of genuine leather.
- The second reason is that the split belongs to the category of natural materials.
- The third important circumstance is that the raw material has excellent external indicators. Sometimes even experts do not distinguish it from genuine leather.
In sewing modern workwear, split leather is very often used. As it turned out, it is convenient and profitable, which also contributed to increased demand for the material in question.