Shoehorn - What for?

This is about how you should slip into your leather shoes and why a shoehorn is usually a good idea for this. Manually, you can replace the shoehorn with your own fingers, but that can be very uncomfortable for your fingers - especially if the shoes are relatively tight. And besides, your fingers don’t offer the same advantages as a shoehorn.

Light marks on the shoe edges

Heavy marks on the shoe edges

What to look for when buying a shoehorn

Material

There are shoehorns made of plastic, metal, and horn, which are the most common variants. Plastic is probably best here, because of the three it is the most flexible: the plastic adapts to the situation, so slipping into the shoe is easiest. In addition, such a light plastic has no hard, sharp edges, as metal can. Of course, “sharp” is relative here, but the thinner the shoehorn, the more pressure a metal shoehorn can exert on the shoe and the more likely the leather is to tear. In that case, skimping on material would be doubly unfortunate.

Other materials, such as horn, will be somewhere between plastic and metal: horn is harder than plastic, but softer than metal. In addition, it does not have those hard, sharp edges we know from metal.

Shape

Why does the shape of a shoehorn matter at all? - Well, this is about the curve of a shoehorn’s edges. Since plastic shoehorns are quite flexible, the edges of the spoon are rather unlikely to press into the leather. And even then, because of the softness of the plastic, I wouldn’t expect much risk. In addition, the edges of good shoehorns are curved inward, which reduces the pressure of the shoehorn against the leather edges even further.

With metal and horn, on the other hand, edges will have a greater effect if they press into the leather. That’s why a curved shoehorn makes sense, where the edges don’t really get into the leather in the first place: this protects the heel area in the shoe from pressure and the edges of the shoehorn point in the opposite direction.

Isn’t the emphasis on this topic a bit exaggerated?

That’s up to each person to decide. Fact is, I’ve already had shoes torn at the heel by using a metal shoehorn. It was a pair of used shoes from Aubercy, which I found especially stylish at the front and therefore liked wearing. Unfortunately, some French brands apparently use more generous sizing, and a size 10 (which is normally more than a good fit for me) only fit me after the shoe had been widened.

The conditions for using a metal shoehorn were therefore not ideal. When I did so anyway during a visit, the tear at the heel happened - unexpectedly for me at the time, because I’d never experienced or heard of anything like it before. My cobbler then stitched the spot and added reinforcement in the heel area, but of course I would have preferred it if the tear had never happened.

Here you can see examples of slight tears, although the smaller tear in the middle area was probably not caused by a shoehorn.