How to Spot Fake Leather

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Rachel and I'm the owner of a austinstylewatch.com, street fashion site, and I'm also a freelance reporter. Today we're going to talk about how to tell real leather from fake leather. So the first tip we're going to do, and this seems really easy and it's actually not always possible, but just look at the label, see if it says "leather". For things like boots a lot of times you'll find it right here on the sole. For newer boots you'll find it inside, usually on a tag sometimes like that one, or you might also find it on the bottom on a sole. So if it doesn't say "Leather" on it, "100 Percent Leather", sometimes it might say "Leather Uppers" which would mean the top's leather, not the sole, that way you'll know it's leather. So these are both vintage, these are old, they don't have those labels anymore, so let's take the next step. Now this one kind of grosses me out a little bit but it's a great way to tell whether it's really leather or not, and that's take a really close look a the skin and looks for pores. And these are just like the pores that you see in our skin, the little holes that are in your skin that let it breathe, just like us cows and all the other animals you might make leather out of have pores in their skin. So if you look really closely at the leather you should see just kind of natural imperfections of pores, wrinkles, things that have happened in the tanning process. With a fake leather it's more like a printed pattern and you're not going to see any pores and you're not going to see any of the natural leather imperfections, you're just going to sort of see a perfect leather-printed pattern. The next step we're going to look at is if there's any cut edges. On leather it should be rough, on fake leather it should be a very clean cut. So this is fake, this is real. So on this we can kind of look on the inside of this boot, right up here around the corner where it's not exactly very neat, it's kind of got wrinkles and roughness, it's not a totally clean cut, it's leather, it's piecey a little bit. Things like this boot, the leather cuts are really just as clean as if they were plastic, and that's how you can tell, not real leather. So, this has been "How You Can Tell the Real Leather From the Fake Leather"."