Leather Headboards: Know your leather grades

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Leather Headboard

Many of the headboards that we sell are upholstered. One of the most important fabrics to upholster bedroom and other furniture with is leather. Leather lasts long, is durable, warm, and luxurious. Many people love having leather headboards in their bedroom.

There are a few different grades of leather, the grades do relate directly to the value of the product, but not necessarily to quality, or to the value of the customer. Most of our customers are surprised to learn that although full and top grain leather are the more valuable types of leather, they require the most maintenance, contain visual flaws, are more difficult to clean, and more susceptible to stains. The grades of leather used to upholster headboards are below.

Grades of Leather Headboards

• Full Grain: Full Grain is the softest, most valuable, and most durable form of leather that can be used to upholster leather headboards. This kind of leather has imperfections, but you can always “try” to look for imperfections. The Imperfections are like a fingerprint, no two hides are the same. Full grain leather headboards for king sized beds, are the pinnacle of leather headboards.
• Top Grain: Top Grain leather isn’t the best kind of leather, as all have their own strengths, top grain means that the leather has been split into layers, the top layer being the strongest layer receives the name top grain. Top grain might have a slight plastic feel to it, as do other split grains, but rest assured your top grain leather headboard isn’t a plastic knock off. In many cases top grain leather is embossed with a pattern on it.
• Split Grain: Once the top grain has been split from the hide, in many cases several other layers remain, these are called split grains. They aren’t as strong as top grain leather, and not nearly as strong as full grain, but they are still pretty sweet. When you see “Genuine Leather”, it normally means you are buying split grain. Split Grain is also sometimes stamped.
• Bonded Leather: Bonded leather has a really unfortunate name, but the bonded leather headboards might be exactly what you need. Bonded leather is made by chemically combining pieces of leather together. In some cases, plastics such as vinyl are used in conjunction with leather fibres to create the new product. There are tons of different kinds of bonded leather.
• Faux Leather and other substitutes: Faux Leather usually means that the material is made from something to appear as though it is leather, normally it is easy to determine if something is made of leather. Some of the products on our site, and on this page are made of leather substitutes, and bi-casts, which are inexpensive, easy to clean and maintain.