Changing shoes, part 1
Changing shoe color, part 1—Polish Part two is here.
Lolita shoes don't come in everyone's size, or to fit everyone's podiatry needs, so you have to DIY them sometime.
If you can find shoes that are roughly the right shape, you can color them and make some minor modifications to make them work better.
You can often make them look much better than my 3-minute photoshop job here. You can’t use polish to get as drastic a change as the one rendered here in my Quality Graphic Design, but we WILL get to how to do that in part 2 of this series.
There's three main ways to change the color of shoes: polish, paint, and shoe spray.
Polish has the most subtle results, but it's often the easiest way to find. You can find shoe polish in most shoe stores or box stores that sell shoes. It also has the least commitment, as it’s the easiest to remove.
Quick note: you will see, through this series of three posts I'm about to make, that I do not stuff the shoes with paper before I polish them. Many people do, because it preserves the shape of the shoe, but I like to put my hand in the shoe to move it around without touching the wet paint/polish. To each their own.
There's two kinds of polish that you'd usually use to change shoe color. One is liquid polish with a sponge on the top, which goes by names like “scuff cover” or “instant polish”. The other is traditional paste polish, which comes in a metal tin that usually just says “shoe polish” on it. Kiwi is the most common brand in the USA.
Liquid polish is faster to apply, but has less of a luster and can't be built up to get a more intense color change. Paste polish requires some elbow grease to make work, but it's better for the shoe (especially if it's leather) and is less likely to get blotchy. You can apply multiple coats to get a better finish.
Liquid polish is easy to apply and doesn't make a mess. You press down on the sponge to start the flow of product, and then rub it around to spread it over the shoe. You don't touch the shoe until it dries, and then it's clear and ready to go. If your liquid polish is close in color to your shoe, any blotches that it makes will blend in. Once it's totally dry, rubbing it with a clean, dry cloth can add just that extra bit of shine.
You wouldn't normally use liquid polish to change a pink shoe into a white one, but here's my best attempt at doing so. When I add another layer of polish, it activates the layer below it, which makes blotches and allows the pink to show through.
You can use liquid polish to change shoes from brown to black or another similar color. You could make black shoes burgundy or navy, but you have to stay at a similar level of lightness.
If the shoes are porous, like top-grain leather is, it's easier to apply liquid polish evenly, and you can do more coats before you hit the blotchy point.
If you can find a paste polish in the same color as your liquid polish, you can add the paste on top to even out the color and protect the finish.
You apply paste polish by flooding the shoe with the paste, waiting for it to dry, and then buffing away the extra. The force you apply when you buff the shoe makes the wax more evenly applied and shines the shoe as well. After you apply a coat, you can buff it and then apply another coat, to build up the color more.
You can get a set of brushes for applying paste polish. There’s a small one for applying it, and a large one for the buffing process. Since I don’t have those, I use a scrap of whatever quilt cotton I have on hand to apply it, and a sock that’s lost its mate for the buffing part.
Uneven color spots on paste polish are generally more spread out and harder to notice than on liquid polish. Paste polish also protects the shoe from water and dirt, which liquid polish generally does not.
This is what it looks like when you try to polish a white shoe to cordovan. Again, shoe polish isn't really the product that you would use to make a white shoe burgundy, but I wanted to show the limitation of the product's capabilities. This brand of polish comes in several colors (most of which are shades of brown) and you could easily tint a medium brown shoe into another color the polish comes in. You could make brown shoes a dark navy blue or burgundy, but you can't make a white shoe black.
In terms of making black shoes into other colors with polish, the shoes will never get notably lighter, but they will take on the undertone of the color of the polish. If you have black shoes and you need brown or navy, you can usually use paste polish to make shoes that are a very dark brown or a very dark navy. Often, that’s better than wearing black shoes with a navy JSK, so that’s worth considering.
You can see that I taped off the soles of one of those shoes. If your shoe soles are porous, you will want to mask them off so that the polish does not get into the soles. Foam RHS soles are the worst about this that I've found.
When you apply polish, either liquid or paste, do one step on both shoes, and then move to the next. Apply the polish to both shoes, let it dry on both shoes, buff both shoes. If you do all the steps on one, and then do the other, you're more likely to have the shoes come out uneven.
Polishing to another color is not permanent. All these polishes can be removed with a melamine sponge (magic eraser) followed up by acetone, so that you aren't doomed to ruining both your pairs of RHS for the sake of your blog. Just remember that you remove all the protective finished when you put acetone on your shoes, so you need to follow them up with a coat of coordinating polish (or neutral polish, in the case of pink shoes) to seal the vinyl back up and stop it from getting dirt stuck in the vinyl.
Also, there might be some mild staining or tinting that happens. I've found that I can easily get the shoes back to the point where no one will notice the color difference when I'm wearing them, but I can see a mild tint difference when I'm in good light and holding the shoes right against each other. The good news is that anyone who looks that carefully at my shoes is in the right position for a kick in the teeth if they decide to say anything rude about it.
I did manage to get the pink-tinted shoe up there back to white by doing another round of acetone and following up with some white liquid polish.
You also probably want to apply the proper color of shoe polish to your shoes regularly, to keep them looking nice. Shoes made of cheap matte vinyl (looking at you, Bodyline) look much better with a coat of polish on them, because it seals up the pores in the vinyl and stops them from holding onto dirt. It also gives them a luster more like real leather or dress shoes. Here we have liquid polish on one shoe and paste polish on the other (shown in top without flash, bottom with flash). They have slightly different results, and you may prefer one over the other. The shoe with the paste polish has more luster, but took several minutes of buffing to get it to that luster level. The liquid polish was much faster and didn’t require any hard labor from my hand.
In general, if you're using polish as intended and aren't trying to change a shoe color, liquid polish is better for when you need to even out a color or cover up scuffs or dirt, and paste polish is used to shine and protect a shoe (while also covering up small problems). You can use liquid polish, let it dry, and then use paste polish on top, if you want the best of both worlds.
The anon who asked for the shoe tutorial specifically about patent/shiny shoes, which you can't polish to a different color, but I thought I'd start this series of posts off with some info about polish, since it's the most accessible and lowest-commitment method.
On to Part 2
