70 | FASHION & BEAUTY
BEST FOOT FORWARD With little chance of a trip to the salon for a thorough foot slough-and-primp, we’re looking at how to achieve the best possible results from home. First off, spend a few minutes soaking your feet in warm water. Add a handful of something soothing, like Westlab’s Cleanse Bathing Salts, a blend of Himalayan and Epsom salts pepped up with the addition of citrusy essential oils. £6.99, lookfantastic.com This will help soften but should be considered the pre-prep to the main event: that inevitable build-up of hard, dead skin will need to be physically removed for tootsies to truly flourish. Before you reach for the parmesan grater, check out exfoliating foot socks. There are a number of options, all following the same broad premise: wear for an hour or so, rinse, and after around a week the dried out top layer will start to drop away.
We tried the SVR XERIAL Peel Exfoliating Foot Mask (£17, feelunique.com) with active ingredients including a combination of urea and skin-safe acids. Unlike other exfoliating socks this will start working in around four days, and usually the full procedure (a miraculous shedding of dry, roughened skin) is complete within a week or so. There’s no denying that you need to make your peace with the fact that you will be leaving fragments of skin wherever you go. Ideally, they should be used before sandal-season starts, but if flapping around in flip-flops whilst self-isolating has had a deleterious effect on your feet, bite the bullet, live with the moulting, and soon beautifully soft feet should emerge from the desiccation, like a butterfly from a chrysalis.
A less dramatic option is to slough off manually. Traditionally pumice stone has been deployed for this purpose. A fabulous alternative comes courtesy of Tropic Skincare. Their Polishing Foot Pebble is described by our tester as “brilliant. It’s effective and quite deceptively abrasive. I doubt anyone would need to use it more than once a week but it’s transformed my feet.” This foaming bar contains sand and volcanic ash to exfoliate and peppermint to leave feet fresh. £9, tropicskincare.com
OX MAGAZINE JULY 2020
When the hard skin has been consigned to memory, get to grips with moisturising. An old trick is to slather on cream just before bedtime then pop on a pair of socks and in the morning your feet may just be unrecognisable (Lotil have a great offering for feet and Vaseline also does the job). Another option is to invest in a foot mask. We love Masque Bar’s Intensive Moisturising Foot Mask – same drill as the sock, but worn for just 30 minutes. Once the time is up, instead of rinsing off the excess, massage the remaining Shea-butter-rich
