Shining Shoe Tips

Today, we’re going to look at shining shoes. For supplies, we’ll need some black shoe polish, an old t-shirt, a shoe brush, some cotton balls, and a cup of hot water.

We’ll start by applying a base coat of polish and then shine it up a little bit with the shoe brush. Since this pair of shoes wasn’t in the greatest shape to begin with, we’ll probably need to add a couple of base coats before our final polish. I polished up the right shoe earlier, and now we’ll tackle the left one. As you can see the left shoe has a number of water spots and long scuff on the toe.

Using the old t-shirt, I’m going to apply polish liberally to the shoe using small, circular,, motions. As I’m getting the side here, you can see that the polish looks rather dull when first applied. After completely covering the shoe, I’m going to dip my t-shirt into the hot water and continue working the polish into the leather. Then, we’ll use the brush to shine up this initial base coat.

Now that we’ve finished the first base coat, let’s see how we did. Surprisingly, I was able to get rid of this scratch with just one coat. However, I still have a few spots to get rid of, so it’s back to step one. While the sides of the shoe were fine after the first base coat, it took a couple of additional coats to get rid of the spots on the toe.

Now, we’re ready to move on to the polishing phase. As we switch from our cotton t-shirt to cotton balls, we’re looking to create light surface swirls on top of the base polish. Whereas we were being very liberal with the polish during the base coat, now we’re just adding a light finish to the shoe. We’re working the damp cotton ball around in order to create a mirror like sheen on the surface of the shoe. After about five minutes, while occasionally adding a hint of polish, the light surface swirls transform into a shiny exterior.