by Lesley Mason

Created on: April 06, 2007   Last Updated: April 07, 2007

Why do women buy shoes that hurt their feet?

For the same reason we dye our hair and spend vast fortunes on potions and creams that, other than the aroma-therapeutic effect are doing little more for us than grandma's cold creamit all comes down, in the end, to sex.

We want to look good. We want to look young. We want to look sexy.

Why we want to look sexy is open to interpretation, it might be to attract the guysit might equally be a yah-boo to the womenmostly it's just to prove to ourselves that we can.

So where do the shoes come in? Take an average height woman, dress her in just about any kind of non-sport wear you can think of: jeans; business suit; peasant get upgive her flat & frumpy shoes. Take a picture, better still shoot a video. Now change the shoes.give her heels re-shoot.

Assuming you haven't given her six-inch stillettoes & she's tottering like she needs a crutch.you will a more confident, sexier woman. Why?

Look at the leg. Wearing heels stretches the calf musclethe leg is instantly shapelier.

Look at the walk. Heels shift the centre of gravityyou cannot stride out like a docker; you have to take daintier steps.

Look at the hipsthis centre-shift, throws the hips forward and to stop ourselves falling over, we have to stand straighter, which means pulling the shoulders back, which also accentuates the bust.

Okay we're straying a bit here. Let's get back down to the ground. Look at the foot. Curving the foot upwards in heels, creates an illusion of a smaller footwithout years of crippling foot binding.

Then there's the height. Men like tall womenthey just don't want them to be taller than they areshoes give a woman height, but she can always take them off!

~

It can't really be this shallow can it? Do we really buy shoes that don't just pinch, but actually, permanently, damage our feet, purely to look good? Not quite. There are all sorts of other things going on. For instance, we all know what size we takeso that's what we buypaying no heed to the fact that the size of feet changes when gain and loose weight, our feet tend to get wider as we get older, they can even swell and shrink half-a-size in the course of a day if we're walking about, or standing, or dancing. The result is quite often that we buy shoes that hurt, because we don't take time to find the ones that don't.

That assumes that we CAN find the ones that don't. The problem with shoes is that you can't take them, or let them out, and like every thing else in this off-the-peg world they come is standard

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