What are your techniques for cleaning your feet after a day's walk around the city? What tools and formulas do you use? My cleaning method: 1. Wash my feet with Water 2. Apply Handsoap 3. Wash Off Handsoap 4. Apply pumice Dr. Scholl's Pumice Foot Scrub forumla on a Pumice Stone and scrub my feet until all the dirt in between the foot creases. 5. Repeat until no more dirt in found in between foot creases 6. Dry feet But some sources like below discourage this due to risk of stimulating callus growth and infection. Source: http://barefootrunning.com/?qa_faqs=clean-feet I am noticing skin cracks lately, am I overkilling it?
I generally don't TBH. I just rinse off any excess if necessary, otherwise I'm a dirty ol' hippie hobo! Shayla x
I've ben doing this for years. It's more about wearing down calluses at the edge of the heel to minimize cracks. A brush, a pumice stone, a sanding board and a cheesegrater (icky sounding but effective). Gut the sxcess skin away from the sides of the foot. Anything else is superfluous.
Usually a normal showering does it for me, using the same shower gel as for all my body. Probably some slight greyshade will remain, but that's ok i guess. For tenacious stains a have a scrub brush in reach. If i go for a walk in the landscape around my house and it's wet, i potentially make use of an outside tap where i deposit another brush to remove the mud (i just don't want to spread it in the stairwell and this way displease my neighbours).
A little soap & water on a wash cloth when they're really dirty or just before I go to bed. If you don't wash them just before you go to bed, it's the same as wearing shoes to bed.... most people don't do that, do they? The only other thing that I do is apply some Udderly Smooth Body Cream after I wash my feet. It really helps to keep them from getting too rough feeling & cracking. I like Udderly Smooth because it isn't greasy, works about the best of anything that I've ever used & it's made in the USA.
I'm with you on this. As long as I'm not dropping dirt or mud on the floor my feet stay like they are
Great responses so far! For those who apply lotion on feet, do you make sure every bit of dirt residue is removed before applying lotion or do you just apply over top of the residue? I'm wondering if applying lotion on slightly dirty feet will prevent bacteria from otherwise naturally falling off the feet.
I'm with Shayla on this one. My feet,especially my soles,get that dirty it's impossible to wash all of it off so they stay as they are!
1. Initial washing of the sole using a couple of handwipes per sole. 2. Follow up with a damp soapy washcloth per sole and the washcloth is usually quite blackened. Sorry, but contrary to the belief of many barefooters that feet are fully washable—enough walking on burning hot asphalt tends to bake dirt into the sole and then that gets covered by the very surface dirt. That baked in dirt won't even scrub off the same day, even using such as a bleach tub and tile cleaner, and in fact all scrubbing does is scrub off surface calluses. Assuming no additional barefooting,that baked in dirt has to wear away on its own over a couple of days. Walking on sidewalk turns it grayer, but it's still there. Otherwise, only a sufficiently long walk on the beach by the water gently moistens the sole and the soft sand finely scrubs that dirt away, but that still has to be done the following day. 3. Wash them again as part of the normal daily shower. Any baked in dirt that went to the surface ends up as darkened footprints when the wet sole allows that dirt to get off the soles. Not cleaning these footprints soon enough leaves a stained shower that needs more intensive cleaning.
I can see blacktop causing that problem. I have an old blacktop driveway that doesn't turn my feet too black any more, but if I go to town the blacktop parking lots will do that. Fortunately for me, I only go to town once a week or so. Most of my barefoot walking is done on the tile floors in the house, on grass, on my concrete shop floor or in the dirt of my back field. I have noticed that my feet seem to get dirtiest in my shop. They tend to turn pretty black from that floor. I have noticed though, that if I spend enough time in my dirt field, my feet clean right up so that just a wet washcloth & a little soap will get them looking pretty white again. Whatever color they are, I really don't care any more though.
