How Natural Leather could influence Leather Dye Colors

Previously, we have talked about leather dye colors and how to choose them to get the desired shade on the leather surface. This topic has drawn attention among our readers and customers, so we decided to dig deep into this topic, bringing some practical examples. As already mentioned, all leather dyes for leather crafters have the main characteristic of being semi-transparent, therefore the final shade is modified by the base-color of the used leather.

The main types of leather are used by the leather crafters are:

• Vegetable Tanned Leather
• Chrome Tanned Leather

Leather that is rarely used is Aluminium Tanned Leather. The latter have the characteristic of being completely white once the tanning process has been completed, that’s why it’s also called wet white.

To clearly show how the leathers influence the final shade after the leather dyeing process, we took a vegetable tanned leather, a chrome-tanned leather (with a very light finish) and an alluminum-tanned leather. Then we chose three colors from our color chart: Pink G1041, Blue G1058 and Brown G1096.

First we applied the Pink G1041: on aluminium-tanned and chrome-tanned leather you can see the pink shade, while on the veg-tanned leather it appears to be almost tan-brown. This happen because pink has as main component a red leather dye, that is strongly influenced by the "red-yellow base" of the veg-tanned leather.

Then we applied the Blue G1058 : on alluminium-tanned leather it appears very bright, on chrome-tanned leather the blue shade become darkner and on the veg-tanned it seems to be almost black. Why so much difference? Because blue leather dye in combination with "red-yellow base" of veg-tanned leather interact creating a black shade.

Finally we applied the  Brown G1096: in this case we can notice some differences among the three different types of leather but this color remain very similar.

This practical example demonstrates how leather dye colors can give different results on different types of leather.

Therefore when you have to choose the color for your creation, it is always necessary to pay close attention to which leather you have decided to use, since the final result could also be very different from your expectations.