I’ve been working with faux leather for the last twenty-five years of my life, and let me tell you that it’s one of the most durable and toughest materials and fabrics you can use and work with, however, it’s very sensitive to some chemicals, and this is what I’m going to talk to you about in this post, what you need to avoid exposing your faux leather table to, in other words, things you need to keep it away from.
The first chemical or product you need to keep your faux leather table away from is alcohol.
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Even though I work with faux leather and other leather fabrics and items all the time, my wife once made this horrible mistake:
She wiped our faux leather table with alcohol in order to get rid of some stains!
And after some few months, it started cracking, even worse, some parts started peeling and discoloring!
She didn’t tell me at first, but then, I asked her what was going on, and she just told me: “I used pure alcohol to clean it!”
I don’t want you to do this, you must understand that alcohol is extremely dangerous to the chemicals and molecules in faux leather fabrics, in other words, alcohol is going to change them dramatically, it’s going to destroy them!
Then, how can you clean your faux leather table?
When you have stains or other things you would like to get rid of, even when you are dealing with a bad smell, the best thing to do is to use warm water and a dry sponge.
This is the advice I always keep repeating to people who want to clean or maintain their faux leather tables and other faux leather items in excellent conditions.
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The second chemical to avoid exposing your faux leather table to at all costs is a bleaching product.
When dealing with faux leather fabrics and items made with them, for example tables, jackets, and even shoes, bleach can be an extremely dangerous chemical and you must avoid it as much as possible.
For this one simple reason:
It will destroy the color, in other words, your faux leather table is going to lose its color and its good looks in general!
Indeed, bleach is going to act in the same way as alcohol, only worse!
It’s a very powerful chemical, it’s going to destroy the dye in your faux leather fabric and this is going to make it look horrible, and let me tell you that even if you try to color it again using some faux leather dyes, it will never be the same!
Then, bleach and alcohol are the main chemicals you need to avoid as much as possible.
Another chemical to avoid as well is glue.
And here, I’m not talking about simple glues children use, I’m talking about the strong ones, sometimes, when you have a tear in your faux leather table or other faux leather items, you may think that gluing it using “any product” or even worse, “super glue”, is the right thing to do, but this can be extremely dangerous and in fact, it’s going to simply melt your faux leather fabric and destroy it!
It’s because most glues are going to use chemical reactions that produce heat in order to stick things together, and let me tell you that faux leather is made out of plastic molecules, so, heat is going to destroy it completely!
If you have a question or comments, please, don’t hesitate to post them in the section below, I will happily answer everything you ask very quickly.
Mark says
I want to fade my brown faux leather jacket to give an other vintage look. Can I use bleach on a sponge and wipe it down?
Jean-Marc Chateigner says
Bleach would do it.