Yes, I know it feels as though you’ll be wearing tights and boots forever – this winter has lasted a SERIOUSLY long time, hasn’t it!? But trust me – before you know it, warmer days and nights will be here and you’ll be prising your feet out into daylight and strappy, delicate shoes – so the time to start preparing for the big reveal is now.
Hand and foot guru Margaret Dabbs pioneered the medical pedicure, which draws upon her experience as a podiatrist to combine foot health with aesthetics. She recommends regular treatments to maintain your feet at their healthy and beautiful best – but her range of targeted-care products are also available for you to get fantastic results at home.
I loathe cluttered bathroom shelves and half-empty bottles – I mean, they’re just insulting aren’t they? They jeer “Oh hey, hi. You spent a fortune on me, tried me and I didn’t really work all that well. You’re a bit of an idiot aren’t you?!” No – I’m a big fan of brands who put the best of their eggs into a smallish basket for you to experiment with before settling on your favourites. The Margaret Dabbs Discovery Kit contains four key products – a soak, mousse, lotion and oil, all containing emu oil, the ‘secret ingredient’ of the range – and is priced at a very reasonable £39.
As it turns out, I could have bought all of the products in their full sizes because I LOVE them – but that’s okay, because these small ones will take up residence in my travel and gym kit. It’s funny, because emus definitely don’t have very nice feet (actually, come to think of it – except for the fact that mine have five toes rather than three, they’re quite similar to what my feet looked like when I broke the seal on the first of the products) but emu oil does WONDERS for dry, crusty, cracked, hard skin. An organic and natural by-product from Australia, it contains Vitamins E&A (both of which healthy skin adore) as well as linoleic and oleic acids. Combined with other oils, such as tea tree, eucalyptus and lemon myrtle, the smell of the products is vibrant and zesty, with all of the aromatic freshness that you might expect from such Antipodean ingredients, and none of the cloying perfume that I dread in other brands’ offerings.
And more than anything – they work. I’ve been using the foot soak and exfoliating mousse a couple of times a week, applying the foot lotion after each shower, and the foot oil (which is so rapidly absorbed that it’s a joy to behold) each night before bed – and I’m in an agony of impatience for some sunshine now, just so I can show off my feet! In fact, despite having new and stylish Mahabis slippers and a freezing cold kitchen floor, I deliberately went barefoot the other day when someone was coming over, just so that I could prance about on my pretty feet. A quick slick of one of the polishes from the range didn’t hurt either – Ranunculus is the one for me, but there are plenty of more daring colours to choose from as well – and all them are treatment-enriched so that the polish, like the pedicure, is performing a function that’s as much about health as about beauty.