One Hundred years ago everyone knew how to treat leather. Leather was a big part of their lives. Read "Two Years Before the Mast". Before the gold rush they sailed from New England around Cape Horn to California to buy hides. Leather was used for everything and they used a lot of it.

Today nobody seems to know anything about leather or where it comes from. In a style forum recently a guy was telling readers to tan leather by leaving it in the sun. Is that a joke? No, he was serious. Look if it's leather, it has been tanned. It's called tanning because it's a process using tannic acid that takes about six months. It isn't done at the beach.

When you buy leather goods, especially expensive leather goods, you want to take care of them. What should you do?

Here is an email I received the other day:

I just bought a top quality brown leather jacket by Andrew Marc. I treated it with water/rainproofing spray which I usually do with my leather shoes and handbags. Then I applied / rubbed with cotton, a leather conditioning balm (with beeswax) all over the jacket. Now there are dark brown spots from the balm after application. I don't like the uneven color on the jacket. Will these dark spots from the conditioning balm eventually disappear out even out? What are the possible remedies to even out the brown color?

Please help!

Lina

She just couldn't leave it alone. After the jacket maker bought the best leather, from a tannery that spent six months tanning and finishing the leather so it would make a quality jacket, she had to mess with it. DON'T DO THAT. As I say on my leather care page:

When we sell you leather goods, it isn't a kit... it's finished. If it needed something on it we would have done it, or chosen different leather.

I also say, "If you want it to stay looking like it did when you took it out of the box, put it back in the box". Fine leather changes with use and becomes better, just use it in a reasonable manner and enjoy it.

One more caution... even though I say the tanners and finishers have done all that needs to be done to the leather, there is also the part about the maker choosing the proper leather for its use. That also assumes that both the tanner and maker aren't cutting corners with quality.

When buying leather goods, especially imported leather goods, smell the leather first. There are a lot of ways to tan leather other than using tannic acid. In some countries they even use urine. Sometimes they rush the process and then use formaldehyde, (which isn't allowed in the U.S.) as a preservative. You know what that stuff is, it's what they kept that frog in that you dissected in biology class.

It might not be too noticeable at first, but after being stored in a closet for the summer you might find that new jacket too stinky to wear if the leather was preserved with formaldehyde.

Henry H.