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Polish Now your shoes are clean, the leather is cared for and the colour refreshed. Only the deep, elegant water-shine is missing. Tear the cleaning cloth into strips of about 12 to 15 cm wide and roughly 30 cm long. Stretch your index and middle finger away from you whilst the palm of your hand is turned upwards and lay the cloth strips over both fingers. Then twist the two ends hanging down together until the cloth is tautly stretched over the two fingers, and hold this twisted roll firmly between thumb and index finger (of the same hand please). Pour some cleansing water into the lid of the shoe wax tin and dip your two cloth-bound fingers into this lightly, so that the cloth is damp but not dripping wet. Now take some shoe wax and rub this in a circular movement with little pressure onto the leather. The spot should not be bigger than 5 cm in diameter. Carry on rubbing in circles on the same spot until you can feel a change, meaning the wax is getting firmer. A somewhat fatty, streaky grease-glaze should slowly begin to appear. If this is not the case after about 15 seconds of regular circular movements, then take a little more wax, dip the fingers briefly into the cleansing water to get one or two drops, and then repeat this procedure once again. If the wax still remains soft and you cannot feel the resistance getting any greater, then wait half a minute, soak up a little more cleansing water and work into this spot again. Only when you have begun to achieve a glaze in one spot, will you understand the principle. The circular movements are decisive, with not too much pressure, and the right mixture of cleansing water and wax. When the glaze has finally appeared in one spot, then you can continue with the next spot. When the whole shoe has been worked on in this way, lay on the next layer over it all, with less wax but more cleansing water and even less pressure. In order to remove the last fine streaks, the surface is rubbed very lightly with the damp cleaning cloth. Almost all kinds of smooth leather can be highly polished in this way. For your first experiments it is best to use old shoes made of smooth black leather. New shoes are most difficult to polish like this. For the first polish one takes about 1 hour per pair. This time and energy expenditure decreases to roughly 15 minutes as the shoes get older. Once you have achieved the perfect glaze, it is sufficient for a longer period of time to go over the polish with an old tie or satin cloth. Until today it is not clear for me what exactly happens, physically speaking, during this kind of polishing. How exactly the water-shine develops. All recipes of shoewax suitable for water-shine contain a large portion of “Canouba wax”, which is the hardest wax. On the other hand those products containing beeswax are unsuitable for the water-shine. |
