De-Ming Your Feet With The Superdrug Rapid-Pedi Electronic Foot File

Feet are ugly. No one has nice feet, it’s just a fact of life and especially for runners with all we put them through, but it’s possible to get them slightly less minging, especially if you’re going to be wearing sandals or (shudder) flip flops during the warmer months.

My feet are especially minging and I didn’t get to wear sandals at all last year and not just because of the hard skin (which I keep hidden in sandals that cover most of my feet anyway) but because, like a lot of people who run or walk a lot, I wasn’t in possession of a full set of toenails and if no one wants to see feet anyway, they definitely don’t want to see ones with toenails missing.

The main irritation about my feet though is the incessant hard skin on the side of my big toes and on the bumpy bit (possibly not the scientific term) on the side of the foot. This is possibly hereditary as I have a clear memory of my mum sitting in the front room on a Sunday night cutting hard skin off her feet with nail scissors (yeah, yuk, tell me about it).

Although I’ve never gone that far, I’ve used a pumice stone (a budgie would have got more use out of it as it was akin to rubbing a smooth pebble on my foot and made absolutely fuck all difference and I’d have been better off letting a budgie nibble my feet, ‘coz at least that might have been quite a nice sensation), foot files I thought would be coarse enough (they weren’t), a sandpaper block (probably should have used a less fine grade), a metal foot grater type thing (that didn’t do a bad job, to be fair) and I even went to a chiropodist to pay him to scalpel away all the hard skin but I was left disappointed (he said he couldn’t chisel away any more skin as it’d get sore. I didn’t care, dammit – I wanted that hard skin gone, but he said if I wanted to pay someone to torture me I could probably find someone advertising that kind of thing in the window of the local newsagent).

The only things I hadn’t tried were that fish pedicure thing, as I thought that was mean to the fish, and an electronic foot file. I’ve been eyeing up electronic foot files for years because my reckoning was they’re electronic and must be made for industrial-strength hard skin, yeah? Well, Superdrug gave me the chance to find out when they recently sent me details of their new foot care range which included YEE HA an electronic foot file. Yeah man, bring it on!

The Rapid-Pedi Electronic Foot File is, um, an electronic foot file. It kind of looks like what I remember old-fashioned Lady Shaves looking like (they could still well make electric shavers for women for all I know. I have no idea. I’ve been using the same cheapy razor for about five years) but instead of metal turny things (possibly not the scientific term) that rips hairs out of your legs, it has a coarse roller that files away the hard skin on your feet.

It comes with a fine grain roller in pink (because pink is for girls and girls are soft) and a coarse grain one in blue (because blue is for boys and boys are hard) and all you need to do is click the roller in place, press the safety button and slide the switch up and roll the foot file over your hard bits (yes, I’m still talking about feet, thank you).  It also comes with two AA batteries, a cleaning brush and an instruction leaflet.

I, of course, chose the blue roller – not because I’m a boy but because, as mentioned above, my feet are minging. I probably had about an inch of hard skin to get rid of and, after using the foot file, that was mostly on the floor. Thank da lord for the Dyson cordless vacuum cleaner. If I had thought of it, I probably should have weighed myself before and after, as the foot file got rid of so much ming I was probably half a pound lighter than before I’d started filing my feet.

You’ll be pleased to know I’m going to spare you from before and after photos, so just trust me when I say THIS THING WORKS. Okay, I haven’t got baby soft feet (yeah, like I know what a baby’s foot feels like) but it certainly got rid of most of the hard skin and I reckon, used regularly, the rest will disappear.

Superdrug’s new Summer Feet range includes a wide variety of products, such as the Soothing Foot Lotion which is suitable for vegetarians and vegans, and displays the cruelty-free ‘leaping bunny’ logo (as far as I know, all Superdrug’s own brand toiletries are suitable for vegetarians and vegans and display the ‘leaping bunny’ logo but please check each individual product [if you care about that kind of thing, that is]).

Thank you to Superdrug for sending me the foot file and lotion. You can get them in Superdrug (duh) where – at the time of writing – you can buy the foot file for £16.61 instead of its original price of £24.49 and the foot lotion for £2.99 instead of £3.49. Other products in the range include an exfoliating foot scrub, cracked heel repair cream and a hard skin remover.