Quote Originally Posted by davidlpope View Post
My guess is that it is kip skin or just plain old high quality cow leather with a nice coating of oil/wax. My understanding is that this was later blancoed by the Army, who then later switched to lampblack for a uniform appearance with less effort.

As for why you don't see it anymore, in mind it's simple: the cheap, shoddy products in circulation today are more cheaply produced in black. One needs high quality leather to look good in lighter colors like natural tan...
Good point David. Although my understanding was that the Army used a suede finished leather to apply the blanco to.

As to the quality issue- you're dead on there. Black covers a multitude of sins. A natural leather with only a wax or oil finish must be of good quality, something rarely seen in the import sporran/leather market.

It just struck me as odd that an entire colour option basically vanished. I wonder if it's possible to pin down the time the natural colour stopped appearing in Highland wear catalogs. I guess OCRichard would be our go-to man here. Hopefully he'll chime in eventually.

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