Our pick Saphir Renovateur Our conditioner pick Its ease of use and efficiency make it worth the premium. Shoes treated with this conditioner had a better shine, and one jar will last about 100 shines. Buying Options $24 * from Kirby Allison's Hanger Project *At the time of publishing, the price was $20 .

After you clean your shoes (with a cleaner or with a slightly damp rag), conditioning them is the next step. Conditioning should form the basis of your leather-care routine. Out of the 25 shoe-care guides I read—written by shoe-care professionals, shoemakers, leather tanners, and menswear enthusiasts—21 enthusiastically recommended the use of conditioner (the four guides that didn’t simply failed to mention conditioner use at all). Conditioning your shoes is a vital step because leather is basically flesh—without moisturization, it will lose its pliability and start to acquire a decidedly duller look as creases form. In extreme situations, the leather will start to crack and flake, which is in most cases irreversible.

Leather is basically flesh—without moisturization, it will lose its pliability and start to acquire a decidedly duller look as creases form.

After reading through 20-plus-page debates about conditioner choice on menswear forums, reading shoe-care guides, speaking with leather-care experts and tanners, and conducting in-store testing with Stanley Mayes and his crew, I can say with confidence that Saphir Renovateur is worth the extra cost over Venetian Leather Balm and Lexol Leather Conditioner.

Renovateur has a lot of hype surrounding its supposedly miraculous abilities to nourish leather. Although a good deal of that is hyperbole, Stanley Mayes and I both ended up pretty impressed with Renovateur’s performance. Kirby Allison, of the menswear website Kirby Allison’s Hanger Project, writes that Renovateur "deeply penetrates the uppers to supply the essential nutrients required to maintain the leather’s optimum condition and suppleness, while preventing any drying." Nick Horween of Horween Leathers (one of the oldest continuously running tanneries in the US) told me that he found Renovateur to be a “a very refined product and easier to control than the Venetian,” one of our other tested conditioners.

Stanley Mayes and I tested the leather conditioners on my Allen Edmonds Clifton bluchers. Due to a series of circumstances (including, but not limited to, vacation and laziness), I’d last had them polished about three months prior, and I’d worn them only several times thereafter. They weren’t cracked or flaking, but they did feel as if they could use some conditioning.

As I watched Mayes work Renovateur into my shoe, I recognized the ease of control that Nick Horween had attributed to the product. It didn’t sink into and darken the area where Mayes initially applied it (unlike Venetian Leather Balm). Instead it remained malleable, and it spread easily and evenly across the leather. Mayes told me that Renovateur’s superior spreadability allowed him to get more coverage out of a single dab compared with an equivalent amount of Lexol Leather Conditioner or Venetian Leather Balm. We noticed that Renovateur took longer than the other products to fully absorb; this is good, however, because it gives inexperienced home users a larger margin of error.

As Mayes closely examined the shoe and ran his fingers alongside the vamp and quarter that he had treated with Renovateur, he commented on how nourished the leather felt—that’s what polish-ready feels like. I also took the liberty of flexing and feeling the Renovateur-treated vamp and quarter, and in comparison with the results from using Lexol Leather Conditioner and Venetian Leather Balm, the Renovateur-treated side felt more naturally moisturized. The leather no longer felt as dry, and I didn’t detect as many micro-wrinkles as I had before.

All three conditioners, according to Mayes, did an adequate job moisturizing the leather, but he and I preferred Renovateur for several reasons. The Lexol Leather Conditioner–treated side felt moisturized, but much like the Lexol cleaner, the conditioner left a perceptible tack to the surface. Moreover, Mayes said that he felt the Lexol product failed to penetrate as deeply into the leather—for your shoes, this means that the conditioner’s effects won’t be as long-lasting. Venetian Leather Balm also left the surface adequately moisturized, but Mayes and I noted that it too left a perceptible residue on the surface—not tacky like the Lexol product’s results, but more of a plasticky, artificially smooth feeling akin to the feeling of a laser-printed image on paper.

Mayes told me that he discontinued testing Lexol Leather Conditioner on his customers’ shoes because he found it to be inferior to the bulk conditioner that he was already using in the store.

Under longer-run testing, Mayes confirmed the conclusion that Renovateur was the best conditioner for home use, even given its higher price. Mayes told me that he discontinued testing Lexol Leather Conditioner on his customers’ shoes because he found it to be inferior to the bulk conditioner that he was already using in the store.

He then pulled out a surprise for me: He had gone ahead and cleaned, conditioned, and polished the Allen Edmonds Cliftons I had left behind, but had used Venetian Leather Balm on one shoe and Renovateur on the other. He directed my attention toward the toe caps; on any shoe, the toe cap is especially vulnerable to scuffs and scratches when you drag it against the sidewalk, say, or stub it against the teeth of an escalator. "A good conditioner," Mayes told me as I looked closely at the toes of my shoes, “should fill in minor scuffs and scratches and prepare the surface to receive an even polish.”

As you can see in the pictures, Renovateur was far more effective in smoothing out the scuffs I had generated over the course of several wears (the DC Metro system does your shoes no favors). The shoe treated with Renovateur also had fewer small wrinkles (the larger ones remained on both shoes—no conditioner is a miracle worker) in the crease points where the toe box bends. Mayes mostly attributed this result to Renovateur’s superior nourishing qualities.

As with an expensive face cream, a little bit goes a long way.

The only major concern he had about Renovateur involved its packaging. It comes in a squat, wide-mouthed glass jar that looks more like a container of expensive face cream than a shoe product. And as with an expensive face cream, a little bit goes a long way. He noted that a dime-sized dab would be good enough to cover at least half of one shoe—meaning that three dimes’ worth of product would be good enough for one shine. Following this guideline, a 75-ml jar should last you at least 100 or so conditioning treatments. Unfortunately, Mayes said, the wide mouth means that an overzealous person could easily kill the jar in five or so polishes, and that "for the price it’s sold for, I wouldn’t be surprised if a customer I sold this product to came back upset if they ended up using too much." The key to avoiding that situation is to dab with Renovateur rather than to pour it out.

The competition

Venetian Leather Balm suffers from the same problem as Saphir Renovateur: It comes in an open-top container (though one that’s decidedly more utilitarian-looking than the Renovateur jar), which means that overuse is a very real possibility. In our tests, while Renovateur’s consistency was closer to that of a lotion, Venetian Leather Balm’s consistency was akin to that of a toner—nearly liquid. This meant that Stanley Mayes had to be diligent about keeping his rag moving along the shoe, lest the product absorb unevenly into one spot and not thoroughly nourish another. Although the precise formulation of Venetian Leather Balm is not available, I have heard several shoe-care and menswear experts speculate that it contains a higher level of solvent. In practice, Venetian Leather Balm absorbed the fastest into the leather; however, Mayes mentioned that the fast absorption may have happened partially because the elevated level of solvent meant that the substance was also dissipating into the atmosphere.

Lexol Leather Conditioner comes in a shampoo-bottle-like container, which in our tests made controlling the amount that came out significantly easier. The consistency was somewhere in between that of Renovateur and Venetian Leather Balm—not really a lotion but not really a liquid, like a homemade salad dressing. And the Lexol conditioner itself took somewhere in between the time of the other two products to absorb into the leather.

Mink oil is another product that experts frequently cite as an ideal substance for moisturizing shoes, and for good reason: Mink oil is remarkably similar to human sebum (the body’s natural oil that also serves to "waterproof" our skin) in chemical composition. You can find a bevy of mink-oil products, and in fact, our top pick, Saphir Renovateur, is a mink-oil suspension. But we did not test other mink-oil products, for two reasons. First, Renovateur was the most widely recommended mink-oil-containing product, so it stood in as a competitor representing the general field of “good” mink-oil products. Second, many mink-oil-based products also contain silicone, which serves as an effective waterproofer because it blocks up the pores of the leather—but this action prevents the leather from breathing, which leaves it susceptible to moisture buildup and faster decay.