30 Days to a Better Man: Shine Your Shoes
My task today is to savor the ancient ritual of fine shoe care, the shoe shine. Most if my shoes don’t fit the bill for polishing and shining, but all that do are getting some extra attention tonight.
Here are my tools of the trade: a horse-hair brush, a tin of black polish, a application brush, water and cotton balls. I have never used the water and cotton balls, so today will be an experiment to see how well this works. An orange-pink towel is extraneous and doesn’t impact the final shine.
I hoped to get a good before and after that was going to really wow me, but I had already buffed the shoes before I took the picture above. Below is the post-shine picture. The left shoe has received the cotton-ball treatment and the right only the usual polish and brush approach. I think the difference is noticeable and thus will likely continue to cotton-ball polish my leather shoes.
This process has reminded me that I need to update my shoe care kit. I have my eye on this military kit sometime in the near future. I do think that well cared for shoes speak a lot for a man and this art is one I plan to hone in the future.
Many thanks to AoM for creating the 30 day challenge.
My favorite song involving shoe-shining: