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.