It's tricky to clean the inside of your car. Obviously, you can't do things like in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, wherein you spray off your car interior with a hose and your windows closed until it fills up like an aquarium before you open the doors and let the flooded car's water spill out, dirt and all.
You instead need to carefully clean the most accessible leather parts of your car by hand with painstaking detail or, barring that, remove the seats altogether to make it easier to rub them down with a lot more elbow room. It's never as easy as in the cartoons.
Back to Basics with Leather Cleanup
- A Damp Sponge and a Bucket of Clean Water: Wipe down the leather with clean water. Rinse out the sponge and squeeze out the excess water, then wipe the leather down some more. Don't wipe with a soaking-wet sponge. Rather, you should go about it the same way you'd mop the floor. You have to squeeze the water out of your mop then mop the floor with a mop head that's damp instead of inundated.
- Using the Right Cleaner: After the wipe-down is through, that's when you should go about wiping, squeezing, and rinsing your leather seats and upholstery with either a leather cleaner and protector like KevianClean Leather Cleaner or you can use plain soap and water plus good old elbow grease to get it done. Keep on cleaning and rinsing repeatedly until the stains, discolorations, and the foam from the cleaner is all gone. Dry the leather up with a fluffy towel or a microfiber cloth then allow it to air-dry for an hour.
- The Importance of Leather Conditioner: Hair drying out can lead to it getting easily damaged, which is why shampoo companies make products that include conditioner into their shampoos or are standalone conditioners you're supposed to pair up with their shampoos. In turn, dry leather can also suffer from rapid wear-and-tear, thus necessitating the application of leather conditioner that restores and conditions the suppleness of your leather seats back to health.
- Conditioner Is Best Used on Genuine Leather: After cleaning out your leather seats and upholstery, you should restore the lost emollients and oils from the material with a high-quality leather conditioner. Leather used to be the skin and hide of animals, so of course it requires conditioning and moisturizing. This doesn't apply to plastic leather or pleather as well as vinyl with leather patterns on it. You should use the right cleaners on those, like a vinyl cleaner or all-purpose interior cleaner like KevianClean Interior Defense.