Everyone wants to choose for himself/herself an authentic pair of shoes. However, not everyone knows how to select a pair of shoes with genuine leather. Below are some useful tips for you. 

1. Genuine leather

With genuine leather shoes, at first use, the leather may be a bit hard, but from time to time, the leather will be glossier and softer.

The symbol on leather hand-made products is composed of animal parts including head and four hands.

Use your fingertips to press gently on leather surface. If it is resilient and returns to its original state quickly, then it is genuine leather.

Real leather dyed with natural colors will change its color in a natural way after a long time of usage. Real leather often has a distinctive odor coming from natural leather characteristics.  

 

True skin is often smelly due to the nature of the skin.

2. Fake leather

Fake leather does not change its color from time to time.

Fake leather may be very soft initially, but after a period of time, it will become harder.

Shoes with fake leather are easy to get broken or peeling and cracked surface.

The symbol of fake leather is a rhombus shape.

Fake leather often smells like plastics, gasoline or paint.

2.1 Pig skin leather

Don’t be surprise! These pairs of shoes are often very cheap. Pig skin leather is characterized by small "dimples" on the surface of the leather, and also many triangles on it. You shouldn’t spend a large amount of money to buy these shoes no matter how beautiful it looks. The reason is though these pig skin leather shoes are cheap, their quality and durability are worse than other leather types.

 

Pig leather products are cheap but quality, durability is not as high as other types of leather.

2.2 Sheep skin leather 

Sheep skin leather has a lot of pores which form a long strip across the leather surface. It has a lot of small oval holes. Sheep skin leather is soft and thin, which is ideal to be used to make belts and wallets. Sheep skin leather is often less durable than cowhide.

2.3 Cowhide leather and Buffalo leather

Genuine cowhide leather has smaller pores which are evenly distributed, while genuine buffalo leather has bigger pores which are not evenly distributed. Cowhide leather is softer and smoother than buffalo leather. Cowhide leather is often used to make men shoes.

If you look at it carefully, you will see that men shoes made with cowhide leather will be softer and glossier.

2.4 Goat leather

Goat leather is pretty durable with plastic, firm and smooth surface. The skin surface has arched veins and usually has three to five large pores on it, and tiny holes around it.

2.5  Crocodile leather and ostrich leather

If the skin type is true, the joints between the layers are soft, flexible.

These are two high class leather types. If it’s genuine leather, the joints between the scale layers are flexible, soft and the horn layer is hard. Meanwhile, with fake leather, the joints are not flexible and more rigid than the scales, because they are the result of hard pressing.

Leg skin of ostrich has the same structure as chicken legs, with scales positioned in the middle same as fish scales. If it’s fake, the scales will not be overlapped as layer.

The pores of fake leather are perpendicular to leather surface, and there’s no hole among pores. Pores of real leather often create 42 degree angle with its surface and there’s a hole through the leather among pores.

Shoe trees come in many different types, or you can also make homemade newspaper

Fake leather

Pores are the simplest thing for you to distinguish genuine animal leather to make men shoes with fake leathers. Other types of hand-made leathers don’t look exactly like genuine leather.

You need to pay attention to the cutting corners of leather edges to have the best assessment.