the strategist

The Best Foot Peel Is Japanese and Called Baby Foot

At this point I won’t even buy a beauty product unless there’s an extensively illustrated Reddit thread devoted to its efficacy. Why bother? There are a billion beauty products in the world, and 99 percent of them don’t work. To find the ones that do, I turn to the internet. The internet was born to do two things: disseminate pornography and aggregate obsessive beauty reviews.

This is how I found Baby Foot.

Baby Foot is a Japanese treatment that removes dead skin from your feet, leaving them as velvety and smooth as a baby’s appendages. The process is both shocking and painless. Let me describe it.

First, you buy a Baby Foot kit. Each kit comes with a set of plastic booties filled with clear gel. You insert your bare feet into the booties, tape them shut, and wait an hour. Then you remove the booties and rinse your feet. Nothing happens. A week later, your feet slough pieces of sliver-thin, leathery dead skin that range from the size of a Tic Tac to the size of a pita pocket. This continues for about 48 hours until your feet are reborn. The process does not hurt or itch. In fact, it feels wonderful. Your feet look like they’ve just received the world’s most expensive pedicure.

It’s great to have silky feet. There are many benefits: You can wear sandals without having an emetic effect on bystanders; you can shift about in bed without snagging the sheets on your rough hooves; you can play footsie with confidence.

But you know what? Baby Foot is more than a podiatric miracle. It’s a product that will make you believe in beauty products again. Because everybody who does Baby Foot undergoes the same cycle of disbelief, repulsion, fascination, and conversion. It never fails to do what it promises to do. There’s a whole Reddit thread to back me up.

Buy it: $16 at Amazon

The Strategist is a series of smart, obsessive shopping guides from the New York Magazine section of the same name. We’ve scoured the web to bring you the best of the best. Some of our latest conquests include rolling luggage, water bottles, umbrellas, beach tents, iced coffee, nail clippers, and yoga mats. If you buy something through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Please note that all prices are subject to change.

The Best Foot Peel Is Japanese and Called Baby Foot