As quarantining à deux goes, you could do worse than Jamil Moen and Robin Linn. The couple has been staying positive and busy at home in Culver City, Calif., with pursuits both shared (classic film screenings, head-shaving sessions) and individual.
Mr. Moen, who is the brand director of the Honest Company, is committed to working through his stack of old New Yorkers, while Mr. Linn, a recruiter for Netflix animation, has been whiling away the hours by creating adorable snails and bugs out of Sculpey clay. And on the seventh week of self-optimizing in place, they tried an exfoliating foot peel.
The duo slipped on goop-filled plastic bootees and waited for an hour before washing their feet, as instructed. And then they waited. At first, nothing. After a week, their feet were soft and peony-pink, and their floors littered with what looked like potato-chip crumbs. “When you lose track of the days, this is a great way of marking the time,” Mr. Linn said.
One of the more bizarre results of Covid-19 has been the unleashing of a very particular sort of foot fetishist. The at-home foot peel is as much a beauty treatment as it is a thrillingly elaborate arts and crafts project one can undertake on his or her own body. It’s also a great conversation starter.
Enthusiasts pepper Facebook groups with chatty updates (“I’m going to do it!”) and they post Before and After photos on Instagram: peeling heels and toe beds whose detaching skin flaps call to mind decrepit shingles or Egyptian mummies loosely wrapped in burial linens. The After photos show specimens more tender and gleaming than adult feet have any right to be. Our obsessive washing and hand-sanitizing is drying out our hands, but at least our other extremities can be soft and beautiful.
The foot-peel phenomenon has been growing in recent years, but with so many of us still rooted in place, often without shoes on, it has reached new heights. For some, foot treatments offer an alternative to the pedicures, complete with perfunctory callous gratings, that were a staple of our previous lives.
The actress Naomi Watts posted on Instagram an image of her feet, with seashells positioned to mimic overgrown toenails. “Gotta tell you. Fully outgrown this,” she wrote in her caption. “Despo for a pedi. #corona.” Others just want something to keep life weird and interesting. “I’m not doing it to have better feet, I’m doing it for the process,” said Bella Gonzalez, who works in marketing in Minneapolis. “I’m one of those people who love to watch Dr. Pimple Popper squeezing things. I’m like, if that can happen to my feet, I’d love that.”
Though there are many options on the market, Baby Foot, which was founded in Japan in 1997 and has been distributed in the United States since 2012, is considered the original and most sought after of the foot-peel field. It has also been the hardest to come by.
A spike in sales during quarantine led to a temporary outage on the Baby Foot website as well as ulta.com, its biggest distributor stateside. (A visit to the Ulta website at 7:43 a.m. on a recent Wednesday generated this pop-up message: “35 people have added this to their carts in the past hour.)”
The lockdown has been the best thing to happen to the product since 2015, when superfan Kathie Lee Gifford shared her love with a horrified-looking Hoda Kotb. “We had to vacuum in my dressing room!” Ms. Gifford gushed. While Americans have been scaling back on other cosmetic purchases (lipsticks and masks don’t mix), Baby Foot sales in May were up 52 percent over the same month last year, according to Kim Webb, the director of sales for Baby Foot USA.
Compared with the challenge of obtaining an elusive package, I found administering the treatment almost disappointingly easy. Inside a Mylar bag awaited two plastic bootees, pre-filled with the magic gunk. I slipped them on, taped the openings around my ankles, and kicked up my feet.
Putatively scented lavender, the most detectable note was alcohol, but the aroma was undetectable as I gave over my attention to a reality show about the makeover of a frowzy restaurant in Finland. When the restaurant’s dining room’s transformation was revealed, I squished over to the bathroom, and washed my feet. The skin that had been steeping in solution felt slightly tight and dry, as it would for the following few days while I waited for my own transformation.
The formula contains 16 natural extracts and fruit acids, a fact of which the packaging is evidently proud. The active ingredients, however, are the decidedly less botanical trio of glycolic acid, salicylic acid, and lactic acid, which are common to face peels. “These agents break down keratin bonds in our skin to get rid of calluses and the dead skin layer,” said Casey Ann Pidich, DPM, a podiatrist at Park Avenue Podiatric Care. “Glycolic acid is the strongest, and it can be very irritating to some people. It’s like a chemical facial, for your feet.”
Dr. Pidich sees little cause for concern — though she echoes the packaging’s cautions against using if you’re pregnant or your foot has open sores. And the rough skin on our feet is there for a reason, she points out. “Calluses are our body’s way of protecting our bones and our pressure points,” she said. “They’re going to build up again.”
No two results are identical, which fans say is part of the appeal. “Some people will get nothing but powdery flaking,” Ms. Webb said. “Others will get a reptile that comes out of their skin. It’s kind of cool.”
I had to wait a full week before I started to notice the bits of dead skin that feathered around my feet and rained down on my yoga mat. I continued to shed for another week, at which point my previously cracked heels were unrecognizably smooth.
Those impatient to see their own results are advised to soak their feet daily, which will hasten the loosening of dead skin (imagine a sunburn). A gentle exfoliant such as a sugar scrub is sanctioned, but picking and peeling are not. But asking users to refrain from scratching off flaps of skin is an often unreasonable request; the picky-peely element is precisely what draws many fans.
“I would put it in the bucket of gross but satisfying,” said Lucie Greene, a trend forecaster and brand strategist who lives in Manhattan and just underwent a Baby Foot, for the third time in her life. “It feels like prepping for when we’re finally allowed out,” she said.
The craze is one answer to the heightened anxieties of our time, said Craig Richard, Ph.D., a professor of biopharmaceutical sciences at Shenandoah University and author of “Brain Tingles.” Unlike the soothing pleasures associated with his specialty of ASMR, the joys of a foot peels align with what he classifies as “the popping, picking, peeling, and pulling” category. “It’s not necessarily at the level of OCD,” he said. “But these are compulsions accompanied by a rush of excitement that quells anxiety.”
Emily Schmidt, a television writer in Los Angeles, heard about Baby Foot from one of the all-women’s Facebook groups she belongs to. “We talk a lot about weird things to do with our bodies,” she said.
One of the hot topics of late was Baby Foot, and how members were having a hard time getting their hands on it. Ms. Schmidt waited until a downhearted Tuesday night to apply her hard-obtained package. “I was in a bad mood and I was like, I can’t experience the rebirth I need right now, but I can experience the rebirth of my feet and that’s going to be enough.”
