For twenty years I told my nan she’d “done that to herself.” The bunions on her feet. With wearing high heels, so often, through rain and shine. Weddings, funerals and Tuesday parish council meetings between 1974 and, let’s be generous, last week.
My nan likes kitten heels. My nan ended up with feet that look like a geography textbook diagram of a coastline. Cause and effect.
Plain and simple.
Until I spent her wedding anniversary sat next to her at my cousin’s wedding last September. Both of us wearing shoes that would make us hiss by the cake cutting, nursing our swollen feet under the table, when she told me her sister – my great aunt Pauline – also had huge bunions on feet slender enough to probably fit into many of Nan’s heels. Pauline hated heels, wore flats all her life because they were “common.” Same feet. Radically different footwear backstory.
I physically placed my glass of prosecco on the table because what the actual fuck was wrong with the Doherty women’s feet, and more importantly how had I been so arrogant for two decades about something that clearly wasn’t true?
So I Googled it, which is a weird phrase to type because what I actually did was stay up until 11pm researching before sending panicked, invasive messages to a podiatrist I follow on Instagram until he probably regretted accepting my follow request. Except what I discovered doesn’t fall into neat hate-groups that shout at each other on the internet. The “My feet hurt because of heels!” crowd. Or the “Bunions are genetic, wear bloody whatever makes you happy!” crowd. It’s both…and neither. Which is a lot messier, and a lot more interesting, than deciding which Internet tribe to shout at.
TLDR: it’s mostly your mum’s fault, not your shoes’
Ok, so in case anyone skipped to the bottom of this article like a sane person, let’s talk about actual bunions, for a second. If you haven’t suffered the joy of having one, a bunion is where the joint at the base of your big toe drifts outward, leaning your toe inward towards your other toes, creating that claw-like shape and a lump on the outside of your foot where the joint begins. And the number one cause of that, research shows* tells us, is the shape of your foot. How the ligaments are formed inside, whether your joints are naturally more flexible than the average footnote, whether you naturally have a foot type that’s prone to drifting in the first place.
*I know, I was surprised too.
Much of this is genetic. But in the specifically bone-structured-way your joint is formed, not just “oh ankle problems run in my family” genetic. Your mum’s feet, specifically. Which, whoops. Like I said, full illustration of how life likes to mock us over here.
My mum has bunions. My nan has bunions. My trainer-wearing, flat-loving aunt Denise has bunions, and they began appearing faster and younger on her feet than they did on my mum’s.
If heels were the issue, auntie Denise is the-inline citation that invalidates my entire argument, gathered round your meme carpet. She wore flats and trained most of her life and should, in the narrative I’d built up over years, have been completely fine. Instead, she’s living, bunionsome proof that the foot she was born with was always going to do this bunion thing whether she punished it with heels or pampered it with pollen stuffed socks.
I relayed this to Mr Okafor, the aforementioned Podiatrist, who was enough of a saint to humour my Late Night Google Entry ramblings via Instagram Direct Message. And he paraphrased, in far simpler terms than I’ve managed to paint it here, that your footwear choice isn’t the arsonist, it’s more like the gremlin that kicks the door in once the fire’s already started. Dramatic? Sure. But it reframed how I looked at the problem pretty perfectly.
But wait! Shoes obviously aren’t totally innocent, let’s not jump to the opposite extreme
This is where I would start angrily waving my phone if this was someone else’s article and they straight up acquitted heels of any responsibility whatsoever. Which would be incorrect, and again, not what talking to actual experts revealed. You want a shoe that funnels your weight into that big toe joint from the second it hits the ground? High heels. You want to force your toes into that exact same angle your drifting joint is already aiming for? Narrow pointy toe boxes.
Your genetic foot value meal might have bunions written all over it from the start, but that doesn’t mean shoewear is completely absolved. Throw enough gasoline on a decently formed fire and eventually something’s gotta burn.
The way I knew this? Been there, done that, nearly cried that. I bought a pair of court heels, pointed, an actual size too small because SALE emboldens us all to do stupid shit, and wore them for two days straight traversing the conference centre of Manchester for work. Two days of walking literally miles between buildings had my left foot looking like it was murdered and thrown out the window when I pulled it out of my shoe. Bright, angry mark across exactly where the bone structure that apparently runs on my mother’s side of the family causes my big toe to flare when it’s had enough.
They went down with rest and ice and heaven knows what soothing foot salve, but it was exactly the kind of painful real life illustration of what Mr Okafor was talking about that clicked all of this into focus for me. The shoes didn’t cause my foot to suddenly decide to go rogue on me. They didn’t magically ‘cause’ a bunion to form where there wasn’t already the inclination to do that. But throw two days of that on top of the inherent structural foot freakshow I apparently inherited from the Doherty women? Yeah, sureee, why not have a bunionsome feet.’
My mate Priya, who’s been standing up for twelve hours a day on wards as a nurse her whole career, wears heels that rarely if ever hit two centimetres, developed a bunion last year. Good mate of mine who I bitched this theory at over coffee before she totally debunked it with a single fact: her mum has similar foot bone structure to hers.
Priya was going to get a bunion regardless of how carefully she selected her shoes, same as my mum was eventually going to, same as I probably will. But her lifestyle and footwear choices didn’t add extra, harmful pressure on top of that genetic inclination the same way high heels would have. There’s a reason doctors say they ‘accelerate the process.’ Priya didn’t have heels on for enough hours a day for twenty years to really fuel that fire.
The short answer to “do high heels cause bunions?” No. And yes. They can incubate an issue that was probably already present and internally vandalising your foot anyway. But throwing them on long enough to bring that bunion forward into where you can see and feel it? Yeah, probably.
How being wrong about footwear than can cause bunions makes us blame footwear
Part of the reason why the whole heels-cause-bunions narrative is so persistent, I think, is that it’s just such an easy story to believe. The idea that your footwear choices can physically warp the natural alignment of your feet feels like a concretething to blame. Points at shoes. Shoes are something you can control. Shoes were clearly the wrong choice! Shoes made me do it!
Contrast that with “you might have a bone structure in your feet that your mum also has that predisposes you to developing bunions.” Hell is other people’s feet, am I right? There’s no pocfinger emoji you can point at mum’s feet and be like, “SEE I TOLD YOU SO!”
People say things like ‘theyre mad at life so they bring problems on themselves” about all kinds of complicated stuff that’s often just down to poor genetics flying shit at us from every angle. Bunions are no different. It feels better to blame your shoes than accept you’ve got a foot condition you can onlyouthrottle rage at because, ultimately, it isn’t anyone’s fault.
It also feels good to be better than your grandmother at making life choices. To wear flats and point judgemental fingers at her poor, stubbed toes when she wore heels to school so she could buy us bonbons with the bus fare she saved. Except the feet I’ve inherited from her and my mum are genetically identical. I had a scan of them done via WhatsApp with Mr Okafor last night. No bunion yet, just lucky currently. Feed that scenario another ten years and I could be sat here judgementally Googling heels versus flats next to Nan because I didn’t understand any of this twenty years ago and she probably will know longer care enough to explain herself.
The other version of this argument, which I’ve seen countless times myself, happens in shoe shops. Was watching my sister in law Fern try on a gorgeous pair of pointed heels for her partner’s sister’s christening when the sales assistant leaned over and cheerfully said to a woman BUYING SHOES, “these’ll give you bunions you know.” Because that’s the ScriptedSnippetAdsEveryoneLaughsAt we’ve been sold about footwear and bunions.
No Brighton Vic Falls of crushing foot pain shot across Fern’s face because 1) she had wide feet that didn’t favour getting bunions as far as we were aware and 2) we’ve heard this so many time ourselves it doesn’t evenPhasedHerAnymore. But do you know what? That poor women probably had hoops welded to her feet by the end of the day because someone sold her a believable yet entirely untrue narrative when she was just looking for a bit of ankle support.
So should you wear heels? Probably just not every day
But listen, before we all go marching into our friendly neighbourhood shoe shop and demand they stop talking, this isn’t free passes for everyone to go out and justify their Birkenstocks. My new favourite sneakers are both called ‘bunions hurt’ by different companies and it’s not cool guys. If you KNOW you’re inclined to develop them based on watching your mum/dad/sibling struggle because science and biology and actual shoe research agrees, maybe don’t spend your life at the office in pointy fucking heels.
Those are literally throwing gravel on a bad situation in terms of foot health. Especially if you’re noticing a gradual tilt towards bunion-city at the tip of your big toe. Heels aren’t the devil, no reputable scientist or medical professional is coming for your Guccis, but if you’re going to wear a pointed shoe that fits like a precision mould of your feet – wear it knowing that you’re accelerating something that might otherwise not have started yet.
Personally I’m still a heel girl most days, yes that includes last month’s wedding, but I know my limits now. No more devil sales with shoes that are half a size too small because “They’ll stretch!” No more standing around all day on sandstone near the Peak District in shoes designed to make any flats-wearing peasant’s feet scream.
And that, I think, is probably a sensible takeaway no matter which side of the debate you fell on before you read this.
Your mum’s feet probably caused your bunions way more than your favourite pair of Louboutins ever will. But that doesn’t mean you should throw a pair of worn down concert pumps on for a week of dance performances just for posterity. Heels will fuck up your feet whether they’re the root cause of your bunion or not, and accelerating that process is never, ever going to be worth the potential pain.
My nan didn’t cause her own bunions by wearing heels. She was wearing a footwear style that simply exacerbated a problem she was genetically going to have much sooner, and probably sooner than she would’ve had she stayed out of heels for the last forty years. Does that mean I’m going to stop wearing them now we’ve settled the great Internet Bunion Wars of 2022? Hell no. I’m just going to wear nicer ones that fit my feet properly.
