Gadgetory

this is my iPhone 10 and I love it I think it's great but I also think it kind of needs a case and for me the best case even though it's a little bit overpriced is the official Apple iPhone 10 the leather case I think it's a really nice balance of protection and usability it feels pretty good but I think it also looks kind of ugly out of the box look how I don't yellow it is now if you use this for a few months you eventually get something like this which i think is lovely it's got this nice patina and it just feels really personal to me but I don't want to wait a few months so I'm gonna show you later on in this video how I went from this to this with sandpaper and oil and a whole bunch of crazy work but here's a question why do I care this much about cases turns out the best person to answer that question isn't me it's the Verge's resident case expert Ashley Carmen so let's go talk to her last summer I reviewed this phone case pompom phone case and I was so excited when I opened it I was like this is the cutest thing I've ever seen in my whole life and then within three weeks it was literally like a torture device because these little hairs kept showing up everywhere like in my food seriously in my food like there was a random Bowl like a bull it wasn't even near my phone I was like your food would be in there the hair drinks yeah you have one now they stick everywhere I have like shunned this but I brought it out just for this occasion would I buy a phone case I'm the first thing I'm thinking about is like okay I'm gonna protect my phone so when I drop it it will smash none of these cases are that like basic and functional so like what are you looking for with a case well yeah I'm not really looking for protection which is probably a mistake i'm auram just trying to find the weirdest case well I mean the reason I wanted to talk to you is like so this is the after of my iPhone 10 points and so the Apple case on its own is like really like yellow and tan yeah and I wanted it to look cool and weathered so I just started thinking about why I am carrying this much about the way a case looks come when I know up to now I just thought about it as like protection if everyone has the same looking phone everything looks the same right how are you gonna differentiate it how are you gonna express your own personal style right applying the term fashion in cases seems I don't know frivolous but it actually like it makes perfect sense you think it's fashion as clothes like clothes need to have like primary function they need to keep you from dying in like the cold weather whatever like they're functional but like it's how you present yourself to the world but I also think it's like how you present yourself to yourself you feel different than what you're wearing and there's no reason that shouldn't also apply to fun I totally agree like I think there's people out there who buys you know unique Android phones and really not just not like the mainstream ones because they're like I want to be able to show that I am into one bus or something right yeah with iPhones they all they're all the same yeah you are giving away like your like fashion sense to Johnny yeah if he got great fashion sense I guess he wears like the t-shirts and the weird pants yeah yeah I'm not Johnny I have I'm super not it's good design but I want to be it's hard though I mean there's a lot of cool cases but eventually start running into the same things like this glitter falling case you see a ton of these now liquid so it's hard to find these more unique styles okay so what do we learn well first of all we learned Ashley is amazing Thank You Ashley now I feel way better about this project that I'm about to embark on tools cardboard of course I have the unsullied Apple case I went to Walgreens and I got some sandpaper blocks and also coconut oil 100% extra virgin with shea butter and of course paper towel so if you know anything about leather working what I'm about to do to this case is going to horrify you but you know what I don't care it's my case I want to make it feel more like my case and so to make it better I'm gonna destroy a little bit first let me show you how so there are four basic steps to get from this to this the first step is that this case has a protective coating on it you need to get that off I'm gonna sand it off but you could also use like nail polish remover the second step is you need something to darken the leather once you've got that coating off I'm going to use coconut oil but some people use shoe polish I mean you can you could spit on the thing if you want to the third step is leave it out preferably outside in the Sun because it's gonna smell bad and also it the Sun helps speed up the darkening process and then the final step and this is kind of important as one sits back on your phone you just kind of have to worry out a little bit to smooth it out and just sort of get all the little weird bits that happen in the whole process some without looking better okay so here we go I'm starting with a pretty heavy grit and then I'm gonna go to a lighter grit but you could just use whatever you got sitting around the house and immediately you're gonna see this is this is a really scary thing I'm doing you know just be careful don't over sand it and end up just completely ruining the case but I'm just kind of hitting all the corners hitting all the edges another thing to be aware of is you don't have to hit the edges quite as much as you do like the back and the Apple logo simply because that's where the natural oils from your hand are gonna be hitting the phone the most anyway and so they're gonna get darker on their own this case is gonna be sitting around my house it's gonna be sitting around me all the time and there's a lot of stuff that sits around my house that's wrong the other time that I want to be nice and I want to feel like it's mine so Ashley and I talked a lot about cases in terms of fashion but it's also a thing that's just around I have a favorite chair I have a favorite blanket I've got kind of nice plates and looking at this case every day I can look at it and I will be able to feel better about this thing that I helped make oh yeah I think this thing is ready for oil alright so as I'm spraying this thing it's pretty intense it smells really bad sorry about that and then I do need to work it in a little bit just to make sure it hits all the different parts of the phone so I was inspired to do this by this thread over on the MacRumors forums called patina proud which is just a whole bunch of people who have this case that we're showing off how they managed to get a really nice patina on their case and they talked about their different methods for forgetting there and you end up with something that looks like this and I think this looks awesome it looks just just and cool and mine and that's the point it looks like it's mine whether you do what Ashley does and you buy a bunch of weird cases that are unique to her or you do what I do and you literally destroy a phone case you want it to feel like it's yours technology can be alienating and it can feel generic everybody has the same thing and so customizing your case can make technology be what it's supposed to be it's supposed to belong to you hey everybody thanks so much for watching my weird science experiment if you want to see actual real science you should check out our brand new youtube channel it's Virg science you absolutely want to click the link somewhere here it's awesome