A vegetable-tanned leather side on a cutting table with one corner turned to show grain side and flesh side.
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Leather Terms a Beginner Hears First

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis

Grain, flesh, bend, belly, veg tan. The words you meet before the knife comes out.

Leather terms hit a beginner on the first supplier page, long before a knife touches a hide: grain side, flesh side, full grain, top grain, genuine, veg tan, chrome, bend, belly, ounces. Half of those words describe the animal. The other half describe what a tannery did to it, and the price on the page swings with every one. I have been buying bridle leather for my briefcases for years and the words still decide what lands on my bench, so here are the six questions people ask first, answered in shop language and checked against the glossaries.

Video: Inspecting a black English Bridle Leather Hide, from Marcellino NY Briefcase Maker on YouTube.

Which side is the grain and which is the flesh?

One face wore the hair. The other one faced the animal.

A thumb on the full grain face of a bridle leather bend showing pores and a natural scar.

Start here, because every other term in the list hangs on it. Weaver Leather Supply’s leather terminology page puts it in one line: the grain side is “The outer side of a hide or skin.” The flesh side is the inner one.

Your thumb knows the difference before your eyes do. Grain is tight and smooth, with pores and the small wrinkles of a living skin. Flesh is loose and fibrous, closer to the back of a carpet than to anything you would show a customer. On thick vegetable-tanned leather that fuzz sheds, drinks glue, and rubs against whatever the piece ends up carrying, which is why so much bench time goes into dealing with it.

The same Weaver page defines a split as the lower portion of a hide that has been divided into two or more thicknesses. Think about what that means. Split leather comes from under the grain, so it has no grain face of its own.

That is the first trap on a supplier page. A word like “leather” on its own tells you the material is skin. It does not tell you which layer of the skin you are paying for.

Get used to flipping a piece over before you judge it. The grain sells the leather. The flesh tells you how it was handled at the tannery, how it will glue, and how much work the back will need before anybody can live with it.

What do full grain, top grain and corrected grain mean?

Three answers to one question: what did they do to the face?

Full grain is the face left alone. The leather dictionary’s entry on full grain leather describes it as smooth leather from the grain side that “has not been buffed (sanded),” with its natural grain pattern still recognisable. Weaver’s glossary says much the same thing in different words: the top layer of the hide, with all of its natural grain.

Top grain is where the trouble starts. Weaver defines it as grain leather that has had the hair and natural grain sanded away, then stamped with an imitation grain so the finish looks even.

Corrected grain gets its own entry in the leather dictionary, and the reason for it is spelled out. The grain side is sanded first so the surface comes up even and skin damage disappears, then it is coated with colour and embossed with a pattern.

Read those last two side by side and they nearly match. Different sellers use the words differently, and some use them loosely on purpose, so I would not trust the label. Ask the plain question instead: has the face been sanded?

My own leather is the first kind. My Leather Choices page says I work in Grade A full-grain vegetable-tanned English bridle, from American tanneries and from the UK depending on what is available. Full grain shows everything the animal lived through, the scar from a fence, the vein, the odd soft spot. I’d rather see the scar and cut around it than wonder what a sanding drum took off. A sanded face is a face somebody needed hidden.

Is “genuine leather” a grade?

No. It promises what the stuff is, not how good it is.

Three leather swatches showing full grain, corrected grain and chrome-tanned surfaces and cut edges.

This one costs beginners money. The phrase sounds like a step up the ladder. It is not on the ladder at all.

The leather dictionary’s page on genuine leather explains that makers print the phrase with the leather symbol to show the product is made of leather and no other material. Leather itself is defined there as hides and skins with the original fibre structure intact, so material made from dissolved or crushed leather fibres does not qualify. That is the whole promise. The same page notes that quality depends on species, origin and where the hide was tanned, and that no complete marking system gives end users that information.

So “genuine” on a belt tag works like a hardware store promising the hammer is a real hammer. Good to know. It tells you nothing about whether the head stays on.

The words that do tell you something are the ones from the last two questions. Which layer is it, and was the face sanded? Then how was it tanned, which is the next question, and where on the hide did it come from, which is the one after that. A seller who answers those plainly is usually selling something worth having. A seller who answers with “genuine” and nothing else has answered a question you did not ask.

What is the difference between vegetable-tanned and chrome-tanned?

Bark and time against chromium salts and speed.

Weaver’s glossary gives the chemistry straight. Vegetable tanning uses tannins drawn from bark, wood and other parts of plants and trees. Chrome tanning uses soluble chromium salts, mostly chromium sulfate. My Leather Choices page calls vegetable tanning the oldest form of making leather.

The clock is the first real difference. Sailrite’s comparison of chrome tan and veg tan puts vegetable tanning at several weeks to months in tannin baths, and chrome at a matter of days. The leathers come out of those vats behaving differently too. The same comparison describes veg tan as firm, able to hold its shape, quick to take dye, and good at holding tooled impressions, and adds that it “compacts well for edge burnishing.” Chrome comes out soft and flexible, heat resistant, and steady in colour because it does not patina.

Montana Leather Company’s post on chrome versus veg tanned leather lands in the same place from the buyer’s side. Veg tan “ages better than chrome tanned leather” and builds a patina, while chrome generally sheds water better, though the post admits that is not always the case.

I build briefcases, and for a case that goes into an office every morning chrome reads too rugged to me. Veg tan lasts longer and ages better, and it lets an edge be burnished instead of painted.

Now the other side of it. Sailrite’s list of chrome uses runs to handbags, jackets, shoes, boots, watch straps and upholstery, which is a lot of good work. A beginner who wants a soft, slouchy pouch is not wrong to buy chrome. Wrong leather for my bench. Not wrong leather.

What are the bend, the shoulder, the belly and the side?

The map of the animal, laid flat on the cutting table.

Rolled bridle leather bends with a light wax bloom on a workshop shelf beside a thickness gauge.

Weaver’s glossary draws the map. A side is half a hide cut lengthwise down the spine. A bend is a back with the shoulders trimmed off. The shoulder is the part between the neck and the main body, and the belly comes from the underside of the animal.

The Weaver article on cuts of leather adds what each piece is good for. A single bend has had the belly and part of the shoulder cut away, and the article calls it great for belts, high yield and low waste. Belt makers like a double shoulder because it carries both shoulder blades and lets them cut across the hide. The belly, the article says, is a good starting cut for a beginner and the least preferred piece in a production shop.

Here is how I sort it. I cut briefcases from the bend only, because that is where the fibre is tightest. Shoulder goes into small parts. The belly goes in the trash. When a piece arrives with flaws I am not willing to put my name on, it goes back to the supplier, and you can watch me looking a hide over in the video at the top of this page.

That sounds like a contradiction of Weaver. It is not, quite. A belly is cheap, and cheap is exactly what you want while your hands are learning. It is also stretchy and uneven, which is fine for practice and a disaster on a briefcase panel that has to stay flat for years. The belly goes where the belly goes.

There is more to ordering by cut than fits in one answer, and it gets its own treatment in the buying guides.

What do ounces mean, and where does bridle leather fit?

Thickness in sixty-fourths, and a strap leather built to take weather.

Ounces measure thickness, not weight in your hand, which confuses everyone once. Weaver’s glossary sets one ounce at 1/64 of an inch, about .016 inch, and notes that European suppliers work in millimetres, with one ounce coming to roughly 0.41 mm. A square foot of 3 oz leather weighs about three ounces, which is where the name came from.

Bridle leather is a finish built on top of that. Weaver describes it as firm, rich-coloured strap leather finished like harness leather, with enough oil in it to stand up to weather. Harness leather, in the same glossary, is stuffed with heavy tallows for weight, thickness and durability. Latigo sits nearby: cattlehide, sometimes alum and vegetable tanned, used for cinches, ties and saddle strings.

My Leather Choices page describes English bridle as traditionally very waxy, thick, heavy and stiff, slow to soften. In dry rooms the wax comes up as a haze called bloom, and the page gives the fix in one line: “You buff it out with a cloth and oil conditioner.”

The two bridles I cut wear in at different speeds. UK English bridle carries so much wax that it stays glossy and takes years to break in. American bridle fades and patinas within months. Both get soft. The English one takes its time about it.

Learn the words and you can read a supplier page without getting fleeced. The words will not tell you whether the hide on the truck is a good one, though. For that you unroll it on the table, flip it, bend a corner, and look. More of the beginner material sits under Getting Started, and the man behind this bench is on The Maker page.

Pure Neatsfoot Oil, 8 oz: An 8 oz bottle of pure neatsfoot oil for leather. See it on Amazon (affiliate link).

Skidmore’s Leather Cream: A leather conditioner cream, one option for the conditioner step. See it on Amazon (affiliate link).

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. A commission may be earned if you buy through this link, at no extra cost to you.

Sources

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