Sheepskin and cowhide are the official standard names for sheep and cow leather as required by the state!
One, Genuine leather is the original hide peeled from cows, sheep, pigs, horses, deer, or certain other animals. After tanning and processing in a leather factory, it is made into materials with various characteristics, strengths, textures, colors, and patterns, which are essential for modern genuine leather products. Among them, cowhide, sheepskin, and porkskin are the three main types of leather used in tanning. Genuine leather is divided into top-grain and split leather.
(1) Top-grain leather includes cow, sheep, and pork skins with grain surfaces, featuring natural scars and blood vessel marks, and occasionally knife scars from the processing and low-yield belly areas. Imported top-grain leather also has烙印编号 from the animals. Full grain leather can be distinguished by the pores' size and density, indicating the type of animal skin. There are various types of cow leather, such as milk, meat, grazing, female, male, uncastrated male, and castrated male. In China, we also have water buffalo, yak, and crossbreed skins. Water buffalo leather has coarser and more spaced pores, while yellow cow leather has finer and denser pores. Sheep leather has finer and denser pores with a slight slant, mainly consisting of lamb and goat leather. Pork skin is easily distinguishable due to the regular grouping of hair into tufts of 3 to 5, usually using domesticated pork skin and wild boar skin, with South American wild boar skin being particularly renowned. This skin, with its distinct porosity and grain features, can be processed into extremely soft clothing leather or glove leather, holding significant value. Additionally, ostrich, crocodile, short-nosed crocodile, lizard, snake, frog, and various fish skins (like shark, cod, pomfret, eel, and pearl fish) are easily identifiable and cannot be used to make split leather. So are furred fox skins (like silver fox and blue fox), wolf, dog, and rabbit skins.
Top-grain leather is made directly from the original skins of various animals, or the thicker skin layers of cattle, pigs, horses, etc. are dehaired and cut into two layers vertically. The upper layer, with its dense fiber organization, is then processed into various types of top-grain leather.
(2) The second layer is the less dense part of the fibrous tissue, processed by spraying with chemical materials or covering with PVC or PU film.
Therefore, the effective method to distinguish top grain leather from split leather is to observe the fiber density of the leather's cross-section. Top grain leather is composed of a dense, thin fiber layer and a slightly looser transition layer that is tightly connected to it, and it boasts good strength, elasticity, and workability. Split leather consists only of a loose fiber tissue layer and can only be used to make leather goods after being coated with chemical materials or polished. It retains certain natural elasticity and workability but has poorer strength; its thickness requirement is the same as that of top grain leather.
