I sometimes hear from people that they wait with inserting shoe trees after they’ve taken their shoes off, to let the worst moist evaporate first. While I can understand the logic behind this, it’s definitely not what’s best for your shoes. Here’s why you should basically always insert your shoe trees straight away after use.
Shoe trees is probably one of the topics that I’ve written most of these tip articles about. While it may seem as a basic and straight forward thing, there’s a lot of mistakes done with how shoe trees are used. Another of these mistakes is the focus of this article. The fact that some as standard when they come home let the shoes rest without shoe trees for a while, before they insert them.
The reason for this is that shoes dry quickest that way, which is true. When air can circulate they dry quicker than with shoe trees in them. While it can sound like a wise thing to do, it’s highly counterproductive. Since it’s when leather dries that it contracts, and when most moist evaporate it also contracts the most. Hence, the time that shoe trees are as most important is straight after use. The whole reason for why one use shoe trees in the first place, is to retain the shape and prevent unnecessarily heavy creasing. So to not have them in when they do the most use, is not that practical.
Shoe trees do their best inside the shoes.
Now there can be exceptions. For example if you’ve been caught in a very heavy shower and they are very wet, or when you’ve needed to do a cleaning when the shoes are completely soaked. Then it can make sense to first for example stuff them with crinkled newspaper to let it draw out the worst moist, before inserting the shoe trees (that of course should be of wood, non-lacquered, so it lets the lining leather breathe). And as always, if you from time to time happen to not have shoe trees to insert, it’s not the end of the world, it’s when done as standard things like this have effect. So, as standard, always insert you shoe trees straight after use.
