Thursday, April 8, 2010

Foot Cleaning - A Short History (Archive)

The column found below was published in April 2010 on Wu's Feetlinks. With Wu's passing in 2014, I have decided to preserve these columns here on the all new Wu's Feetlinks Columns Blog as new columnists carry on with the new ones. Please note: Website URLs, e-mail addresses, and mailing addresses found within these republished blogs may no longer be valid.

Patrick, Editor
www.solesofsilk.com










In a world where it is nearly impossible to find a place that you can frolic freely barefoot, touching and bathing another person's feet can be an extremely intimate and personal act which shows signs of trust, love, and openness. Cleansing your own feet can be a relaxing moment that can help you feel refreshed and renewed and has become quite a common grooming habit for many men and women. If you really look at the history of this act you will find that it has been used as an initiation, a welcoming gesture, a purification ritual, and as a means to demonstrate humbleness.

The root of religious feet-washing appears to be found in the customs of many ancient civilizations, especially where sandals were commonly worn. A host would provide water for guests to wash their feet or they would provide a servant to wash the feet of the guests. Roman Catholics believe that Jesus washed the feet of the 12 apostles before The Last Supper to show humility and brotherhood. It also recorded that the observance of foot washing at the time of baptism was maintained in Africa, Gaul, Germany, Milan, northern Italy, and Ireland. In Buddhism, clean water mixed with sandalwood to clean the feet is one of the eight typical offerings and if you cleanse the feet of an enlightened being, it is possible to cleanse one's own karma.

Foot cleansing can involve just plain water but many like to include other ingredients to help soften, fortify and provide relief from tension, stress or abuse. Rose Absolute essential oil can be useful for stress, eczema, menopause and depression while Epsom’s salt (or sea salt), Lavender oil and Tee Tree oil can help relax you and get you ready for a good night's rest. You can also mix a milk and honey bath which provides skin conditioning but also a really delicious aroma and taste. Ingredients are not the only additions to foot baths. You can also add scrubbed and cleaned stones and rocks to the floor of your foot bath to give your toes a little something to play with while you are soaking and cleansing.

You can observe the same rituals and ceremonies as our ancestors or you can create your own. There is no strict set of rules that apply so go wild! Study our past cultures and experiment to suit your taste and comfort level.



Monday, March 8, 2010

Sexy Lines of Allurement (Archive)

The column found below was published in March 2010 on Wu's Feetlinks. With Wu's passing in 2014, I have decided to preserve these columns here on the all new Wu's Feetlinks Columns Blog as new columnists carry on with the new ones. Please note: Website URLs, e-mail addresses, and mailing addresses found within these republished blogs may no longer be valid.

Patrick, Editor
www.solesofsilk.com










What is it about sexy sock and shoe lines that are left behind after a long hard day in a pair of your favorite shoes? These lines of mystery and intrigue usually attract a foot connoisseur in a heartbeat!

I think it is the allure of knowing that our precious feet have suffered all day cramped up in shoes and the moment has arrived where we hold nothing back and we strip them off! All that is left behind to show for the long day walking are rosy red indentations from straps that hold us in, heels that slide against us to cause friction and toe areas that just didn't give us enough room to roam!

Once freed from our foot constraints, our delicate lady feet are just begging to be rubbed, worshiped and bathed in hot soapy foot baths all over the world! That is the perfect time to swoop in and attend to all of our aching needs and even some of your own! Be prepared with that hot foot soak when your lady enters the house after she has labored all day to help bring home the bacon! I promise you that your good deed will not go unappreciated!

There are countless shoe styles that can cause such marks. You have pumps, slingbacks, flats and even flip flops to thank. You can look for and find the marks in various places ...mainly across the tops and the heels of the feet so be sure to pay close attention to pampering these areas!

Now, let's not forget about the sock lines that can happen too! These great lines are sweet proof that the feet have sweated inside tight tennis shoes all day! Some would call this evidence, nothing short of heaven. Just on the other side of those sock lines are little balls of sock lint, hiding like little prizes in between each toe. Can you feel your mouth salivating yet?

Honestly, I do not really care about the scientific reason as to why these marks are so appealing to many. I will sit back and appreciate the fact that somewhere, out there...some one is just waiting for a pair of shoes or socks to be taken off and that the feet contained inside will be sprung loose and cared for! Why question another great part of our ever-expanding world of foot love and fetish?




Friday, January 8, 2010

Foot Funk (Archive)

The column found below was published in January 2010 on Wu's Feetlinks. With Wu's passing in 2014, I have decided to preserve these columns here on the all new Wu's Feetlinks Columns Blog as new columnists carry on with the new ones. Please note: Website URLs, e-mail addresses, and mailing addresses found within these republished blogs may no longer be valid.

Patrick, Editor
www.solesofsilk.com










A large part of the foot fetishist population out there shares a common turn-on, smelly feet. Day after day, countless men and women, enter forums and web sites in search of the smelliest foot. Often they purchase worn shoes, socks and stockings from various models online, in the hopes that they find the perfect foot essence to heighten their arousal and quench their usually very secret lust for foot funk.

So why do our feet smell? What makes some folk's feet more odiferous than others? The main reason for foot odor seems to be courtesy of isovaleric acid-producing bacteria. Bacteria are tiny, one-cell critters that get nutrients from their environments in order to live. In some cases that environment is a human body. Bacteria can reproduce both outside and inside the body. Most bacteria are not good for us, as they cause infections, yet some bacteria are actually good for our bodies and they assist with keeping things in balance.

The bacteria that are on your feet love dark, damp places like the insides of sweaty shoes. They eat dead skin cells and oils from your skin and rapidly multiply in sweat. As their colonies grow, they start getting rid of waste in the form of organic acids and those organic acids are what cause feet to smell bad, or good, if you like smelly feet!

Have you ever known someone who would take their shoes off and could easily clear a room because the smell was really bad? This is because their feet are extra sweaty and produce another form of bacteria called Micrococcus Sedentarius. These bacteria produce more than just stinky organic acids - they also produce stuff called volatile sulfur compounds. Sulfur compounds usually are powerful and awful smelling and if you've ever smelled a rotten egg, you know what volatile sulfur compounds smell like. Excessive sweating is actually a condition called Hyperhidrosis.

Another common contributing factor is a person's diet. It is believed that eating foods that contain spices like onion, garlic, etc can contribute to smelly feet because it will taint the sweat with “spicy” smells. They say eating healthy actually does assist in controlling the scents produced by your feet but do we really want to make the odor go away? Hell no!

We have some of the reasons that feet can "stink" but let's look at the other part of this love affair. Why do people actually get turned on by the essences of a ripe pair of feet? When your feet sweat, this sweat is laced with pheromones which are activated by adrenaline, the hormone that rushes through your body whenever you get excited. The word "pheromones" is from Greek phero (φέρω) meaning "to bear" and hormone ( ὁρμή) meaning "impetus". This could very well be the linking phenomena that attracts different people to different smells, resulting in the attraction that is produced.