We all love our skates and want to keep them in the best condition possible.
But over the hours of skating and sweating in your boots they might not be smelling so great anymore! This can especially be the case in the summer season as high temperature and high humidity can encourage moisture and bacteria to develop odors.
Save the skates!
Here’s our top tips for helping to eliminate odor in your boots.
1. Open Your Boots
The first and easiest tip to helping your skates beat the stink is to open them up after you’re done skating. When you take off your skates, loosen them beyond what you need to get them off of your feet comfortably.
Shorten the tail end of the laces down to an inch or two and take the length of the laces all the way down to the toe. Then, pull the tongue of the skate up and forward to let air circulate through the whole boot.
Loosening the laces and pulling up the tongue allows the boot to thoroughly dry better than leaving the boot closed up. Airing out the smells and odor-causing bacteria is a great first step to better smelling skates!
2. Wear Socks
Having a layer of fabric between your foot and the skate can greatly help reduce boot odor.
When you’re skating and you’re wearing a sock - even a thin one - the sweat and moisture your feet release while skating will be absorbed into the sock instead of the boot lining and insole.
What’s the difference?
If the moisture stays in the boot lining and insole and soaks in, the odor soaks in, too!
Take the smelly stuff out of your skate with your foot and help keep the lining and insole of your skates fresh as can be.
3. Dry Your Insoles and Change Them
If your foot sweats a LOT in your skates you’ll know the feeling of a damp, clammy insole.
It’s not comfy at all!
If your skate doesn’t get to dry between sessions and still feels wet the next time you go skate, this tip is for you!
After skating, once you’ve opened up the boot, you can lift out the insole and let it dry to avoid this feeling and the odors that come with it.
Using your fingernail or sometimes a screwdriver, go along the inside arch area of the insole and pry underneath. The heel of the insole should lift, and then you can grab the entire footbed.
You can lay the insoles near your skates for air-drying between your skate sessions, or if space is limited leave them propped in your skates so the toe of the footbed is sticking out from the top.
If your insoles are gross beyond repair, we have replacements available to give your foot that fresh and cushy feeling! Bring the old one if we need to trim new ones to fit.
4. Use Odor Eaters like Stink-eez and Super Spray
To thoroughly remove smell sometimes additional products are essential. We recommend Stink-eez and Super Spray for your skates and skate socks to cover all the bases!
Stink-eez are a non-toxic desiccant with fun patterns and a variety of scent options. They go in your skates after skating to dry up the lining and help eliminate odor.
Super Spray can be spritzed anywhere! Tea tree oil, Witch Hazel, and Peppermint oil combine to create a safe and effective odor eater that can be used in the skate or on your socks and apparel.
Using any one of these tips is sure to make a difference in the smell of your skates.
Whether you start your next pair of skates off fresh by using these tips from Day 1, or you use these to revive an old pair of skates, we hope these tips bring you all the joy of a field of wildflowers!
And if not a field of wildflowers, at least enough odor control that your skates don’t scare your friends away.
Photo by Carmen Meurer on Unsplash
The Skater’s Edge is Buffalo and Western New York’s one-stop figure skating store for new ice skates, competitive figure skates, and skate sharpening. The skate shop carries Riedell, Jackson, and Edea skates, as well as skating apparel and accessories. With technicians trained by a master sharpener of over 30 years, trust The Skater’s Edge with your next figure skate fitting, figure skate sharpening, hockey skate sharpening or hockey skate repair, as well as shaping your hockey blade radius or profiling.