EU law requires every shoe sold to declare what its upper, lining and sole are made of. Retailers publish that per colourway, not per model, which matters because the same trainer is often leather in one colour and textile in another.
We read those fields for every colourway and apply a fixed rule: any mention of leather, suede, nubuck, wool, fur, silk, shearling or similar fails. Phrases like imitation leather, faux suede and vegan leather pass, because they describe synthetics.
The labelling rule only covers materials making up about 80% of a surface. A smaller component can legally be left off the label entirely. We found a New Balance 9060 whose materials read a clean “Textile/synthetics” while its description said “Suede sections.”
So every product is checked twice, against the materials list and the free-text description. That second check alone caught 31 shoes whose material label looked completely clean, including Air Max 90 colourways and one whose label said “Imitation leather” while the description said “partly suede leather.”
Vegan means both the materials list and the description are clean.
Likely means the materials list is clean but no description is published, so we cannot rule out a minority material. Roughly four in ten products publish no description. We show these separately rather than mixing them in, because pretending we checked something we couldn’t would be the whole problem repeating.
Glues and dyes. No brand declares these anywhere, at any scale. Material-level animal-free is the honest ceiling of what can be verified from published data.
Retailer data entry can also be wrong. Treat this as a shortlist that saves you an evening, not a certificate. Check the photos before buying.