When it comes to your everyday work shoes, even the nicest pairs succumb to constant wear. With shoes acting as protectors for your feet, environmental stressors often cause scuffs and stains and leave your leathers lacking luster.
Setting aside time for deep cleaning and polishing sessions isn’t always easy. At the same time, when you let these inevitable minor issues build up too long, they can leave behind permanent problems.
Therefore, learning to shine shoes in seconds helps restore their glassy appearance between longer cleaning sessions and protects your favorite pair from lasting damage.
To help revive your shoes while cutting down on the time it takes to do so, here at FootFitter we compiled five tips to help you shorten the process.
1. Engage in frequent touch-ups.
Typically, the inconvenient part about shining shoes is the time it takes to do so. However, those long-lasting sessions of vigorously brushing jammed grooves and working out deep marks likely come from waiting too long to intervene.
When you touch-up your shoes’ appearance more frequently, those intense deep cleaning sessions are less necessary and can be saved for when you trek over a truly dirty terrain.
Even taking less than a minute one to two times a week to shine shoes can keep them looking fresh and flawless. In addition, it’s less likely you’ll have to pull out your full tool kit every time you touch-up your shoes, which cuts down on your clean-up time.
2. Handle issues immediately.
To cut down the process more, handle issues when you notice them instead of waiting for the problem to get worse.
For instance, if you walk over a pebbled surface and notice small rocks getting stuck in your shoes’ grooves, use a brush to dislodge them when you get home. Continuing to walk around on those shoes during the week will put pressure on the pebbles and jam them into your shoes further. This not only makes them harder and more time-consuming to remove later but can also cause tears or holes.
Likewise, if you stain your shoes, deal with removing the stain when your shoes dry. Continuing to wear stained shoes leaves your shoes unprotected to further stains that can permanently harm the texture and color of your shoes if not dealt with.
3. Use microfiber cloths over cotton.
In addition to how often you choose to shine shoes, the tools you use also help determine the speed of the process. Choosing the wrong cloth to distribute polish can prove ineffective and even cause further damage.
For instance, certain cotton cloths absorb too much product instead of helpfully distributing it on shoes and removing spots. In addition, cotton can leave behind an unsightly residue of lint. Moreover, textured bath towels can leave fine scratches on the surface of your shoes, harming the overall appearance and shine.
The best cloth option to use for buffing in product and buffing out stains is one made from a microfiber material. Not only is microfiber gentler on your shoes but it also clings to dirt and debris helping the cleaning process move along faster.
4. Pick up an electric shoe shiner.
For some, buffing in polish may still be too much muscle-work and prove to be time-consuming. Thankfully, there is an electric solution that eases your shoe shining stress in seconds.
Electric shoe polishers do all the work for you. Using rapidly rotating buffers and a commercial-grade motor, electric shoe shiners don’t require any back-and-forth action on your part.
Instead, they effortlessly restore shine in seconds by simply pressing a button and putting your shoes underneath the useful machine.
5. Invest in tools to ward off shoe smells.
It’s not always the outside of your shoes that hold the problem. Wearing the same shoes everyday also commonly causes a stinky situation.
While the tips above help with scuffs, stains and shine, smells require more than shoe polish and the right cloth. While there isn’t necessarily a quick-fix to smells, engaging in proper pre-planning keeps shoes fresh.
Simply slipping in cedar shoe trees at night and spritzing a shoe odor spray on your favorite pair can help them smell better by morning.
Odor sprays are useful at soaking up unwanted moisture left in shoes after a long day of wear and offer some instant relief on their own.
Similarly, cedar wood is optimal for smells because it absorbs foul fragrances and masks them with its woody natural essence. Shoe trees will also boost your shoes’ appearance by maintaining proper shape and form while they sit in the closet.
Bettering your shoe care techniques
Overall, learning the correct tools and tips to follow regarding shoe care can make the process less daunting and time consuming.
Shoe care techniques are important and worthwhile because they help you turn your shoe purchase into an investment and make your favorite pairs last as long as possible.
