It is evident that the dressing of leather objects of all kinds is a popular and well-established tradition, yet there is a fair amount of experimental and practical evidence that it has little or no effect on leather's rate of deterioration (except for outdoors where water protection is necessary). It can be argued that the routine dressing of leather is hard to justify in terms of conservation principle because 1) it has little or no preventive effect when applied in the customary indiscriminate manner, and 2) there are so many potentially dangerous side effects. As a whole, leather conservation has not kept pace with the advances made in other conservationareas. Conservators working on leather objects must develop procedures which can be justi-fied in conservation terms and treatments that are based both on relevant research and experience. See also AATA 19-795 for related study.