What is Faux Leather?
Faux Leather Chair Split
Faux leather isn’t actually leather at all, it’s manufactured from different materials and does not contain leather. It has a plastic base. This starts off with a synthetic base such as polyester, this material is given an imitation leather coating and look. If you look at the surface of faux leather you will see it’s very even and leather that’s genuine isn’t like that. It can be made from several layers all glued and bonded together to give it structure and the feel of genuine leather. It’s a polyvinyl chloride PVC material or polyurethane.
Faux Chair Base
When a product has a thickness greater than 0.15mm it can’t be classed as leather, not that this applies in this cases as faux leather isn’t leather at all, it’s a form of plastic with a coating bonded to a material below, that coat is given an effect of leather.
When buying leather just do a simple test and rub your finger along the item if the grain follows your finger then you are dealing with genuine leather, if it doesn’t then you’re dealing with a fake material.
Faux leather is known by many names, vegan leather, pleather, bonded leather, fake leather and leatherette.
Two Faux Chairs
Genuine leather has no mistaking, you can smell it and the feel is much warmer to the touch with genuine cow hide as it naturally attracts warmth, whereas fake materials naturally attract cold.
This video could help you to identify leather and fake materials.
Faux is a French word meaning fake, false, imitation, what ever word you can think of to mean false, that’s what it means, its material is not genuine.