Heels. Yes, heels. We know – you’d virtually forgotten about them since the flat shoe invasion, when suddenly even a shoe which looked like a piece of Lego was deemed date appropriate. And we can’t deny that it’s slightly changed our lives, ditching high heels, in that we can suddenly get everywhere without breaking our ankles.
But – and we are sorry if you feel like we’re betraying the sisterhood, or more specifically, the sisterhood’s feet – but it’s pretty much impossible to forget how fucking great heels make your legs look. A woman has the calves of a goddess when she shoe-horns herself into a pair of stilettos.
The problem, of course, is that high heels are often agonising (and possibly the cause of the flat revolution in the first place.) This morning,* The Debrief’s social media writer, Emma, hobbled into the office in a pair of super-sassy but unbearably uncomfortable four-inch Loubs, bleating softly with every step. Why do* heels cause such pain?
‘The pain that you are talking about when you wear heels is caused by joints getting inflamed, from wear and tear,’ says chiropodist, Martin Harvey. ‘When you put the foot in a higher position, the nerve between the third and fourth toe will get rubbed together by the inflamed joints. The nerve itself then starts to enlarge – it’s called moretons neuroma.’
Like the friendly girls that we are, we wanted to alleviate Emma’s pain, stat. So we did some digging and came up with pretty much the best heel hack ever: tape your third and fourth toes together with Scotch tape (it’s the most similar to medical tape) to instantly allievate the pain.
We’d never heard of it before but 1960s supermodel Marie Helvin swears by it apparently – and by god, does it work. Not only does taping your toes together stop you wobbling – wayward toes are fused as one formidable entity and therefore your balance is improved — but it shortcuts any pain to the ball of your foot, by stopping the nerve rubbing your inflamed joints.
Emma was jubilant. ‘It was immediately obvious how much less painful my taped foot was!’ she told us. We only taped one of Emma’s feet, naturally. Because we are kind, but not kind enough to let it get in the way of a comparison experiment.
‘Normally my toes dig into the side of the heel, so it stopped that and also the ball of my foot was way less painful. Of course, this would NOT look good with an open toe...’
Martin, however, is dubious about the tape as anything longer than a very short-term solution. ‘Theoretically this could work. But only temporarily. And you should always identify the cause of the pain before taping anything, in case you’re actually just making the problem worse.’
So there you go, girls. Tape in an emergency. We’re sure the vertiginous VB’s been doing it for years. But maybe check you haven’t got a fracture, first.
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Picture: Frances Sousa
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.