Thicknesses Of Coatings – Leather Color – Leather Colour

Thickness Of Coatings

The clear coat lacquer layer on the leather is so thin you’d be lucky if this is even 0.01μm thick, it’s not even 1mm in thickness (which is 1000 μm). Jeans can cause this exceptionally fine coating to be removed very quickly with getting in and out of the vehicle.

Therefore, using things that are caustic cleaners, magic erasers, microfibre cloths or scrubber pads, will remove the surface coating in no time, dedicated natural soft bristle brushes are best at all times.

Therefore, it’s essential leather is cleaned with a dedicated soft natural hairbrush, a water-based leather cleaner and not magic erasers, or scrubber pads, and definitely not a solvent based cleaner as this will just rip of that coating in no time leaving the pigmented colour dye surface open to attack.

Leather colour or as some spell it leather color is applied to the surface as a protective coating then a fine coat of clear sealer is applied over the colour – color to seal in the leather.

For leather to be legally classed as leather the full surface thickness can’t be any more than 0.15mm thick that’s only 150 microns, to put this into perspective 80g of paper is only 100 microns.

As a guide the average thickness of the painted surface is around 10-30μm on automotive paint, approx. 20-120μm on furniture, as the furniture manufactures want the couches to last a great deal longer.

The clear coat that’s applied is around 5-20μm on automotive and furniture leather, as you can imagine, that’s microscopically thin.

Therefore, modern leather wears quickly and that is why it’s so important to apply protection creams to protect that fine clear coating. Applying a protection cream will slow this wear down considerably, giving the leather a much longer life span.

Sometimes a pre base is applied this can be around 5-15μm on both automotive and furniture leather, but this is not always applied.

To put this into perspective semi aniline is around 5-40μm this is because there is little pigmentation on the surface and it’s all clear topcoat mainly, so this type of leather is extremely delicate as you can imagine.

This shows the different thickness of coatings on the leathers surface