How to Clean Pointe Shoes

Series Summary

Our feet do an amazing amount of work; it is estimated that each foot carries several tons of weight over the course of a day. If you were to multiply that number over a lifetime, it would be difficult to believe you had done your arithmetic properly. Ironically, we tend not to treat our shoes—the most important item of foot protection—with special care. We tend to expect much from our footwear; we want it to do its job consistently and quietly. Yet, we often neglect to maintain our soles, to give our shoes some much needed TLC from time to time. In this free video series a shoe care and repair expert will demonstrate how to care for a variety of shoes. Learn about shoe care for tennis shoes, pointe shoes and leather shoes. Get tips on caring for biker shoes, boots and hemp shoes, as well as information on how to get rid of foot odor and shine boots. Shoes need basic cleaning and care to keep them looking new and feeling good. Get all the information on shoe care right here in this free video series.

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Mike Summers from Jim The Shoe Doctor in Eugene Oregon. Today we're going to be talking about cleaning and protecting dance shoes, point shoes, ballet shoes, you know, jazz style tap shoes, that sort of thing. We'll start out with a, this is a basic dance shoe. What you'd want to do with a shoe like this, it's kind of hard because it's a metallic. When you clean and protect a metallic shoe, you can use just a neutral polish. This is a leather shoe, or you can use a metallic polish. The metallic polishes have to be a pretty close match to look correct. You don't want a tremendous amount of difference in the appearance of the shine between the two. When applying a polish to a shoe like that, you just rub it in and you want to cover the whole area. You can use a soft cloth or a brush. I tend to use cotton most of the time for cleaning most things because it doesn't leave lint and residue on the finish of the shoe. Once it is dried for just a little bit, you can go back and buff those sections and using the cotton cloth or a brush. With using, colors like this, you're probably going to want to use a cloth because if you use a black brush for polishing a shoe and then you go back and try and put it on something like this, more than likely, you're going to transfer color and it's going to show up in the shoe. So best to use a clean cloth so that you know that you're not putting any other color back into the shoe. On point shoes that are leather, you'd do basically the same thing. You would first clean the shoes. Especially with point shoes because they contact the ground a lot and you have to remove that dirt off the shoe. So you would use a cleaner to remove the dirt and then once you've removed that dirt on a leather shoe. You would apply a polish, whatever color would be correct or a neutral polish if you can't find a polish that matches. With a satin shoe, you would want to use a product like this is made for suedes, satins, nylon, canvass. You can use this on an athletic shoe, on many different materials. This is a really good cleaner. The only problem is that you have to get the entire shoe wet when applying this cleaner. You would work it in with a little brush to clean it. You can use like a soft bristle nylon brush to actually work the cleaner into the nylon. Then you would take and rinse the entire shoe off and then let it dry naturally. You never want to heat a shoe when you're drying it, so you could let it dry naturally. That's how you would clean and protect a leather or satin dance shoe. Thank you."