Full-grain, top-grain, genuine: how to tell what your leather sneakers are made of

Leather grading is one of the few places in retail where the most reassuring-sounding word means the worst thing. "Genuine leather", stamped on a shoe in gold, tells you only that some part of the shoe came off an animal. It is the bottom of the scale, not the top.

The four grades, worst to best

A hide has layers. What a tannery does with those layers is what the grade describes.

• Bonded leather. Leather scraps and dust, ground up and glued to a backing with polyurethane. Often under 20% actual leather. It cracks and peels, usually within a year or two of regular wear.
• Genuine leather. Real hide, but the lower split, after the strong outer layer has been shaved off and sold at a higher price. The surface is then sanded and an artificial grain is embossed on top. It is leather. It is the weakest usable part of it.
• Top-grain. The outer layer, but sanded down to remove scars and blemishes, then finished. Uniform, flexible, decent. Most mid-priced leather sneakers are top-grain.
• Full-grain. The complete outer layer with nothing sanded off. The tightest, densest fibres in the hide are the ones nearest the surface, and full-grain keeps all of them. It is the only grade that develops a patina instead of wearing through.

Three tests you can do before you buy

1. Look at the edge. Find a cut edge, at the tongue or the collar. Full-grain shows a dense, fibrous cross-section with visible layers. Bonded leather shows a uniform grey or beige core with a thin coloured skin on top, like a laminate.
2. Look for imperfections. This feels backwards, but a faint scar, a wrinkle, a pore pattern that changes across the panel: those are signs the surface was never sanded flat. Perfectly even grain, repeating in a pattern, is embossing.
3. Press it with your thumb. Full-grain creases and then relaxes, and the crease softens over time into a patina. Coated or corrected leather creases and holds a sharp white line, which eventually becomes a crack.

The lining matters as much as the upper

This is where a lot of otherwise good sneakers cut cost. A shoe can have a full-grain upper and a synthetic textile lining, and the lining is the part your foot is actually touching for eight hours. Synthetic linings hold moisture, which is most of what people mean when they say a shoe smells. Leather absorbs it and releases it.

When you are comparing two pairs, pull the tongue back and look inside at the heel. If the material at the heel counter is different from the material at the toe, the lining is partial.

What we use

The Tsagué and the Lafrica are built with a full-grain leather upper and a leather lining that runs the whole way from heel to toe, on a stitched rubber outsole. That is the spec, and it is the reason the shoe costs what it costs rather than less.

Caring for it

Full-grain is forgiving, which is the point, but three habits make a difference:

• Wipe salt and road grit off the same day. Salt draws oil out of the fibres and that is what makes leather go brittle.
• Condition two or three times a year with a neutral cream, more often in a dry winter.
• Dry them away from radiators. Heat is what cracks leather, not water.

See the current models, or read about where they are made.