Boot Oil vs Mink Oil - What's Best for Red Wing Heritage Boots?

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RED WING MINK OIL: https://bit.ly/3ts7kXA
RED WING BOOT OIL: https://bit.ly/3mV1pI4
RED WING LEATHER CREAM: https://bit.ly/3ahSnzY

RED WING IRON RANGER BOOTS: https://bit.ly/3wYYuTv

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Guys, don’t make the same mistake I did with my Red Wing Iron Rangers. Darkening your leather doesn’t damage it, but if you want them to maintain their color and attain a rich patina as they age, you need to use the right products.


There are a lot of mixed messages out there about how to properly care for your boots and which products work best for different purposes. To help clear the air, I spoke to no less than six Red Wing representatives around the United States to try and find out the answer, here’s what I found out.

Note that while you’ll get different advice for some of their fancier, smooth finished leathers like the Teak Featherstone, all the Red Wing reps I spoke to said these tips will work on any of the oil tanned leathers produced for Red Wing Heritage boots.

** Ingredients **

Mink Oil: Mink oil, lanolin, silicone, and some other ingredients. (Red Wing, like most companies, is cagey about revealing the precise formula of these products.)

Boot Oil: Mink oil, pine pitch, no silicone.

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** Effects **

For an animal fat, mink oil is really high in unsaturated fat but it’s very stable and unlikely to ever go rancid, so it makes for a useful fat for moisturizing boots.

Mink oil is generally used to make boots weather resistant: it clogs the leather pores and makes something of a barrier that helps to protect the boots from water and muck.

It also darkens the leather. Note that this doesn’t mean you’ve damaged the leather, it’s just changed color.

For many people, all they want is boots that can withstand a beating and they don’t care about the color darkening. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

If you don’t want them to darken, is Boot Oil better? Not really, because it contains mink oil as well. The pine pitch appears to help the mink oil to last longer on the boot so it may require fewer applications and may be more useful for extreme temperatures.

** Preserving color **

Red Wing’s Leather Cream is what you want for that.

It’s made from neatsfoot oil — the rendered shin and feet bones of cattle — and it moisturizes the leather without darkening it. It’s a gentler product, the flipside of a cream that doesn’t penetrate the leather quite as profoundly as the other products is that it might need more frequent applications: every month or two, depending on how hard you wear them. And how much you care about all this stuff.

** The Takeaway **

Mink Oil and Boot Oil are great for weatherproofing and conditioning, and Boot Oil may last longer on the boot. (Red Wing’s Leather Conditioner, by the way, is the same as the Boot Oil with some beeswax added.)

If you’re more about lustre and patina, go with the Leather Cream.

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