Feet are amongst the ugliest part of the body. And it doesn’t matter because I’m not looking at a woman’s feet when I’m looking at her.
Like Khadaji, I think feet are pretty nasty looking. Mine in particular, thanks to a lifetime of hiking and having the proportionate extremities for someone tall and muscular. I served as a guinea pig for my cousin when she was going to school to become a manicurist and got to hear all of the crap you’re supposed to do to keep your feet sexy. Pampering doesn’t work if you’re starting with something ugly as sin.
At this point, all I do is scrape off the calluses to prevent them from cracking and bleeding as they have a tendency to do if I neglect them. I’ll trim my toenails every few weeks, but otherwise I’m indifferent to their existence. My socks are changed frequently and my feet are kept clean, but no amount of nail polish is going to make these things attractive. I could spray them with glitter and walk around with a little pink bow attached to each individual toe and it’d be about as cute as plopping a turd on a wedding cake. They’re feet, for God’s sake.
If I was in a gym setting or a yoga class and noticed someone else’s feet, then they’d have to have cartoon wavie lines of stink coming off of them because otherwise I just don’t pay attention. I don’t expect them to please me at all.
Yeah, that’s pretty much what my first club was like. Your feet had to be clean, dry, and nails trimmed. Even sparring you could be barefoot unless it was full contact, and when that was the case they also made you wear a helmet, chest protector etc. The misty bottle of the alcohol solution was mostly a perk. Coming in after riding my bike across town in the summer, I appreciated being able to clean my sweaty tootsies off.
The second club insisted on shoes. I guess it’s like the Y. You have to wear gloves to use the heavy bag and martial artists must wear footwear when kicking the heavy bag. The sign says it’s for health and safety reasons: if someone busts a knuckle and gets blood on the bag, the next person doesn’t end up exposed to hepatitis or other ookies.
Yep. I can avert my eyes as long as they aren’t going to touch me with them or stink up my house. I was never a big fan of feet anyway and I’d prefer not to be touched by them at all.
Normal, healthy calloused feet are perfectly okay.
However, when it gets to this pont (lots of dead calloused skin) I would say that yes, a visit to the pedicure every six weeks is in order.
A lot of overweight people are no longer capable of caring for their feet properly. I know I have problems doing so, especially when I was pregnant. But I doubt you’d find them in yoga class, if flexibility it a problem.
Picture (kinda gross) of the kind of skin I mean.
If you’re looking for one way to keep calluses under control I started this thread over in MPSIMS:
There are callouses and there are callouses. If the blogger is in a snit about a small callous and not polished nails, no biggie.
If you’re talking about dirty, nasty feet that have funk imbedded in the callouses or athletes food or some other infection? Ew. Offensive - I don’t want to walk in bare feet where I’m going to be catching something from someone elses gross feet.
This is exactly how I feel. As long as my feet don’t stink and the toenails are trimmed and fungus-free, why do you care what they look like?
Besides - I like my calluses because they protect my feet to some degree while I run. It may sound gross, but every time I get rid of them, my feet blister more easily and they hurt a little when I run until they’ve built up again.
Do people have to put in effort to care for their feet? I don’t do anything, other than cutting my toenails and washing them in the shower. And putting on polish occasionally. No pedicures, nothing, and they look fine. Even great. I run, but I wear comfortable shoes. Pretty much all the time, even when I’m not running, actually.
If you have funky-shaped feet so that standard shoes don’t fit you quite right, you can get callouses (ask me how I know!) from wearing them. If you have dry skin all over, that makes the skin on your feet look ugly, too, and so on.
Depends on the person. I don’t do much to mine, either, and mine look good. I keep them polished because I like it. I don’t tend to build up callouses or any other foot nasties at all. And I do run, and take martial arts, it’s just how my feet are.
Some people are more prone to cracked skin and bunions and all that, though. I imagine they have to do a lot more to them if they want to keep them looking & feeling nice.
As for the OP, I agree with everyone who said as long as they’re clean, I don’t care how they look.
After reading Valgard’s thread last night, I actually did google “callus and running”, and eventually reached this (warning: extremely grody). Normal callused feet are fine, though.
FWIW, all the results from my googling agree that it’s best for runners to remove calluses. You can get blisters under the callus that are very painful and hard to heal.
Holy Smokey Robinson. Those are some doozies all right, although I suspect you’re looking at the feet of people who staggered through the Western States Endurance Race, not a few jogs around the track.
Note to others - if you don’t want to see the bottom of somebody’s foot peeling off, don’t click on that link.
I have really horrible eczema on my feet and yes, in the summer, I have to put in tons of work for them to look presentable naked . . . and even then they will often look like the calloused foot picture linked above. Wearing closed-toed shoes in the summer is a drag, but I might have to do that if that’s my only option.