Dry Wax for Best Shine Results

There are many tricks in shoe shining to help you get to the desired results of a high shine. And it helps to know these tricks as there is nothing worse than polishing for hours feeling like you have done nothing and still having a shoe with dull toes. And I am sure that many of you have been there, frustrated with no resolve. So let’s look at how not to ever be there again.

First and foremost, let’s start with the basic idea of what a shoe shine is. Leather has pores, like our skin does, and those pores can be shallow or deep. In order to get a good shine you have to fill those pores and thus create an artificial layer on top of the leather that makes up the shine. That is essentially what a military shine is. Doing this is not always so easy though, especially for different leathers that have different reactions to the polish as well as leathers have really deep pores that take awhile to fill up. So sometimes you can get a pair of shoes with deep pores and you are sitting there for hours doing the wax and water bit and nothing is happening. And that is because the polish is not setting into the pores.

In my previous posts about shining shoes, I have stated that it takes hours and that is not so much of the physical time it takes to do it but mainly because you have to take into account the drying time for the polish to settle, which then?allows for another layer of wax to be applied. If the polish does not settle, you are essentially just swishing around polish on top of the leather, never allowing it to dry, which can cause oversoaking. And this is where the dry polishing comes into play.

You see, the more moist a polish is the harder for it to set into the pores. The drier that it is, the stickier it becomes and the more that it will insert itself in the pores of the leather and thus the quicker a layer will be created to start building your shine, layer upon layer. But again, too much of anything is not good, so at a certain point it will be best to switch back to the moist polish as that will be what gives you that top gloss layer of super shine.

So if you are someone that loves to shine his shoes, but maybe wants to get it there quicker, it will always be best to have one dry wax and one moist wax polish for your shoe shining session. This will ensure the quickest results possible.

Quick tip: To make a new polish become dry/sticky, simply leave the lid off overnight (or two) and for really quick results stick it either in the oven for like 5-10 seconds or heat it with blow dryer/heat gun.

Happy Shoe Shining!

All shoe care products found in this post, available at www.theshoesnob.com

Shoes from www.jfitzpatrickfootwear.com