Polysporin Is The Most Important Beauty Product I Own Right Now

I’ve written before about how I cannot walk in heels, which is true, and so a wiser person might deduce that I instead wear shoes that fit well and are comfortable. This would be wrong!! I mean, that would be the right thing to do, but that is not what I do; just because I can’t balance my weight on a reinforced toothpick does not mean I wear sensible shoes with padded soles and proper traction, shoes that fit my feet and feel good after walking long distances. No. I wear flat or only slightly-heeled shoes that are just a liiiiitle too big for me; sometimes I make the effort to buy an insole or something to make up the difference between my feet and the apparatus I’ve bought to protect my toes from the elements but more often than not I am just walking slightly slower than everyone else, willing my shoes to travel at the same speed as the rest of my body.

I can trust sneakers to fit pretty well. Last week I caved and bought Birkenstocks — white Birks — the smallest size was a women’s six, and they feel great, but I wore them for a big day of ~active leisure~ this past Saturday and came home with teeny tiny little scrapes from where my feet bumped against the second buckle with every flip-flop of the cork sole against the street. The white mules I bought last week fit pretty well, but the leather is a little stiff and now I have a gross cut from where it rubbed up against my toes when I wore it for a day of ~business meetings~

And so now we come to the point of all this: I have recently entered in a very passionate and very real love affair with a tube of Polysporin. I do not say something like this lightly, but I would give up almost any other beauty product for the rest of the summer and as long as I had Polysporin I would get through it. Polysporin is the enabler that lets me keep wearing these dumb shoes and feeling like I’m a smart person; a dab of Polysporin on a sore spot is like a little magic wand that erases the physical evidence of my bad choices.

When I went to look up this magic gel/cream thing, I found out that it is actually a CANADIAN product, and am now riding that wave of patriotic self-righteousness; apparently Americans use a product called Neosporin which is the same thing, so, I mean, if anyone has any strong feelings about Neosporin, feel free to add them, but they seem the same. I noticed that on the Polysporin Wikipedia page (lol) that the brand has “has extended into several other self-care categories as well,” which seems extremely relevant to my interests, so that just further justifies my decision to stay a Polysporin girl in a Neosporin world.

I always get very hopeful when I buy a new pair of shoes, which I think is why, as the the whole cliché goes, ladies just looOoooOooOove to shop for footware. More than any other clothing item, shoes represent a fresh start. I enjoy the feeling of a new dress or pair of jeans or whatever, but a pair of brand new shoes is satisfying in a way more profound for how temporary it is. They’re only going to be new and look new for a very short time; just by wearing them you’re going to drag them through mud and other ruinous natural elements and soon they’ll be scuffed and broken-in but in the meantime they represent a whole new world of possibilities: perhaps they will be the missing unifying piece of an outfit puzzle, a source of comfort and strength during an otherwise physically challenging day, that will let me walk in step with my friends. But when they are none of those things or only some of those things and instead I am cursing the way the shoes cut off my ankles at the wrong place or rub up against my heels and can’t tell if that stabbing pain is just a blister or if I am ruining these shoes by slowly filling them with blood I’m like, well, there’s a big tube of Polysporin waiting for me at home. I’ll just plop a bunch on my feet before I go to sleep and when I wake up to do it all over again I will trust that all is mostly right in the world or at least on my feet, one slightly-painful step at a time.