What Is Vegetable-Tanned Leather?

Vegetable-tanned leather is leather cured with tannins from tree bark, leaves, and fruit, in a process that takes weeks. Most leather sold today is chrome-tanned instead, cured with chromium salts in about a day. Vegetable tanning is the older method by several thousand years, and it produces a firmer, denser leather that darkens and softens with use rather than wearing out. Every Arandjela piece is cut from full grain vegetable-tanned leather from Tuscany. Where every material comes from is on the Product Origins page.

How it is made

A raw hide goes into a series of pits or drums filled with water and ground bark, traditionally chestnut, oak, mimosa, or quebracho. The tannins bind slowly to the collagen in the hide. Tuscan tanneries still do this over four to eight weeks, moving the hide from weaker to stronger baths so it cures evenly all the way through. When it comes out it is a pale, natural tan, and it is dyed, oiled, and finished from there. The oxblood Arandjela uses is dyed into the leather, not painted onto it, which is why scratches on a NO. 88 rub back in instead of showing white underneath.

How it ages

This is the reason to choose it. Vegetable-tanned leather develops a patina: it darkens in the sun, burnishes where your hand rubs it, and takes on a glow that a new piece does not have. A wallet carried for a year looks better than the day it was made. Chrome-tanned leather stays the same color until it cracks. Arandjel would say a veg-tan wallet keeps a diary.

How to tell the difference

Vegetable-tanned leather smells of wood and earth, not chemicals. It is stiffer at first and breaks in over a few weeks. Its cut edge can be burnished to a hard shine, which is why the edges on a NO. 88 look almost glassy; chrome-tanned edges have to be painted. Wet it and it darkens, then dries back. And if you hold a scrap to a flame, veg tan chars slowly while chrome tan curls and turns green-gray at the ash.

Full grain, then vegetable-tanned

The two terms answer different questions. Full grain is about the surface: the top layer of the hide, left intact with its natural grain, not sanded or corrected. Vegetable-tanned is about the cure. The best leather is both, and it is what Arandjela buys. A wallet described only as "genuine leather" is neither.

Care

Nothing complicated. Keep it out of standing water. Once or twice a year, rub in a small amount of neutral leather balm with your fingers and let it sit overnight. Otherwise, carry it. The oils in your hands do the rest.

What Arandjela makes from it

The NO. 88 One Piece Wallet and Le Gabriel, petit, both in oxblood full grain vegetable-tanned leather from Tuscany, hand-sewn in Chicago with French linen thread.