Glossary
Chrome-tanned leather
Leather tanned with chromium salts in hours rather than weeks, resulting in a soft, stretchy, water-resistant hide unsuited to tooling.
Chrome-tanned leather is tanned with chromium sulfate salts in a process that takes hours instead of the weeks veg-tanning needs, which is why it dominates mass-market leather goods, garments, and upholstery. The tanning gives it a soft, supple hand feel and a blue-gray tint before dyeing, which is why it is sometimes called wet blue in the trade.
The chrome tanning process leaves the fibers loose and stretchy, which makes it comfortable for bags, jackets, and shoes but means it cannot hold a tooled or stamped design the way veg-tan can, since the impression simply relaxes back out. It also takes dye more evenly and resists water better straight off the shelf, without needing a separate sealing step.
When choosing chrome-tan for a project, decide first whether you need drape and softness or structure, since chrome-tan will not hold shape the way a firmer veg-tan panel does. It is a good match for linings, soft bag bodies, and garments. A common mix-up is buying chrome-tan for a carved or stamped project and finding the design will not hold, when veg-tan was the leather actually needed for that technique.