I'm Kirby Allison and in today's video I'm going to reveal the top five most difficult
shoes to shine.
Coming in at number five is a really unique material that I promise you've probably never
seen used in a pair of shoes and that is elephant skin.
Elephant skin.
All of the elephant skin you find new boots being made out of today is very responsibly
sourced so not very common and actually very difficult to find these days.
Now this is an elephant side panel it's the only area of the elephant that is used to
make skin anymore.
where as before you used to be able to get ears, and then also the trunk, but now it's
just side panels and you can see that by it's very distinctive kind of square hatching that
you have across the grain.
Now what makes elephant skin so difficult to shine?
If you could reach through the camera and actually feel this skin it is incredibly tough.
I mean think about it.
An elephant that's out there in the wild.
Their skin is strong and you can feel it with this boot.
This has a beautiful, but very rough texture.
Just look at the grain.
It is three-dimensional it has depth to it and this is as unique as it comes.
Now why is this so difficult to shine.
Well there's really two reasons.
One the texture of this leather is so rough that it's difficult to get an even distribution
of the polish over this leather.
Whenever I was applying the Saphir Renevature it would sink into these pores and pool.
You want to prevent that from happening because too much excess wax build up will actually
cause a white residue to form on the boot.
Whenever these were sent in to us as part of our shine program it had that white splotching
all over the boot
that I had
to
first
remove
with
the Saphir Reno'Mat.