I spent a lot of time in furniture stores recently, listening to loads of sales people trying to convince my wife that we really needed THIS couch.
Anyway, what I learned is this.
1) Pretty much all decent leathers are "aniline dyed". That is done in a vat, so all leather is vat dyed.
2) The most expensive leathers are from the least abused part of the animal (no fence cuts etc). Since it takes a lot of cows to make a big couch, one of the things that drives up the cost at the top end is the need to "match" the leather. You can imagine that some labor is involved to find hides that are reasonably close, and that lots of those will have blems, so you keep looking to get everything to match.
The other thing that makes the top end expensive is that the leather is not "protected". That means you get it in its most natural state, of course with the dyes and post-tanning. The big red chair in the exclusive cigar club that is 100 years old? Seen that one on TV? That is going to be a burgendy dyed "pull up" leather - my personal favorite. These leathers are absolutely beautiful, but when you drag your fingernail over them they mark badly, and it won't simply come out - unprotected.
3) Leathers on the bottom end are mismatched, have lots of stitching (cause you use lots of different pieces left over from the good runs) and are "corrected". That means that they are put in a press and given a surface. This reshapes the surface to something other than a brand mark or whatever. They are then analine dyed, and given a "pigmented top coat", aka paint, to protect the finish.
4) The really inexpensive stuff (think Jerome's or Levitt's) is mostly cloth, with an extremely thin coating of leather on top. That is of course painted and protected, but it is so thin that you can actually scrape it off to the cloth, in the store, with your finger nail. This is NOT aniline dyed, but there is no way that stuff would hold up in a Porsche, not even a Cayenne.
I inquired about simply using my McGuires cleaner on the pull up and the guy almost fainted (furniture store remember - full of women). He said that car leather had to stand up to really, really tough conditions (dirt, sand, water, and lots of movement) over many years and as such it was much tougher and the cleaner would be too harsh for the buttery stuff.
Having looked a a boat load of leather samples I am confident that our seats are in fact vat, or aniline dyed, corrected and protected with a pigmented top coat. Depending on how new that is it may be easier or harder to get through with the CPR.
If the leather is a bit older and some of the top coat is on your and your PO's pants and shirts, then likely that teh CPR goes right in and you get butter. If it is newer then it might just site on top of the paint. For example I put some CPR on my 968 seats and it did not soak in too much. My seats appear to have been recovered in the not too distant. I put some on my wife's 2002 Odyssey - went right in. My kids are in and out of that car 3 or 4 times a day - seats get a regular workout. I can't want to clean them and apply liberally - wifey will be pleased.
