• AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      Two entirely different processes. Hides are skins cured with oil, fat, or salt to prevent them from rotting. Leather is a skin that gets soaked in quicklime, scraped, soaked in weak tannin, and finally soaked in strong tannin to turn the skin into leather.

        • Doom@lemmy.world
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          2 hours ago

          In traditional tanning different chemicals are used to process leather. Brains, egg yolks, urine, they all work. The urine isn’t a requirement, it’s a possible chemical compound a tanner may choose to utilize.

        • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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          3 hours ago

          While you can do it that way, I don’t know the process. I know how to make tannin by soaking oak logs in water.

          And yes, that is probably the first way we figured out how to do it, but as I understand it, that’s a very stinky process, and to be totally honest, I found tannin made from oak to be rather smelly.