Really well made leather shoes are a joy to wear, they mould to the shape of your feet and allow your feet to breathe. It remains a mystery why so many people wear trainer style shoes in which one’s feet gradually get hotter throughout the course of the day with nowhere for the moisture to escape to.
We all know someone who has the ability to clear a room when they remove their trainers.
Even the sweetest smelling person can manage to do a good job at stinking up a pair of synthetic shoes. But why is it that feet can produce such powerful smells in synthetic shoes and yet this just doesn’t happen to the same degree in your all leather Loake shoes?
The answer is sweat. ¬Each of your feet has over 250,000 sweat glands and your feet perspire more than any other part of your body. Each day your feet can produce over a pint of sweat each day. Strangely though perspiration is simply a mixture of water and salt and does not have a distinctive smell of its own. However when the bacteria on your skin reacts with the sweat it excretes a waste product which does have a strong odour. Usually this isn’t a problem but the sheer quantity of sweat in your shoes produces an absolute feast for the bacteria.
We do of course sweat all over our bodies and our hands have a similar number of sweat glands to our feet. The reason that we have a problem with our feet is purely down to the shoes and socks we are wearing. The sweat in our feet just cannot escape easily into the air and can remain trapped in the perfect environment for the bacteria to flourish: dark, hot and wet. On removing your shoes and socks the smell which hits you is a mass accumulation of bacteria excretion. Those of you with particularly smelly feet simply sweat more than others.
The solution is simple: wear shoes which allow your feet to breathe. No synthetic material used in footwear allows feet to breather anything like as well as leather does. By following the simple procedure of alternating your all leather shoes and wearing a different pair of Loake shoes on alternate days you can eliminate smelly feet.
