Margaret Dabbs Medical Pedicure at Liberty £80
Margaret Dabbs Sole Spa Total Manicure £35
Dear all, I am the bearer of good news. You need no longer stomp from podiatrist to pedicurist in the pursuit of happy feet. You need not even be embarrassed to reveal your feet monstrosities to another, or feel there is no hope for tired soles. These are all things of the past for me and now, hopefully, you; for I have found a place which treats all foot ailments, and treats them in style. The place is the Margaret Dabbs Sole Spa at Liberty. It was an experience I’d be all too happy to repeat.
The first thing to mention is the staff here. They knew their stuff, were happy to offer tips and advice without any snootiness, and were extremely accommodating in general from beginning to end. The second thing is the extraordinary expertise here – the equipment table itself was something of a surprise to me:
Now, to the treatment. The feet I placed before their senior podiatrist, Tamara, were pretty disgraceful. Having only had traditional pedicures and found that they seemed to only gloss over my foot/nail issues (of which there are many) I thought a medical pedicure would just be a more intensive version of the pedicures I’d previously had. I had massively underestimated the Dabbs medi pedi.
To illustrate this I am going to over share and show you a before/after of the bottom of my feet:
Tamara looked at my nails and immediately saw that my toenails were on the verge of growing in (those of you who have been subject to the sight of my feet will attest to the veracity of her observation) and would cause me considerable problems in the future if not sorted. The wonderful thing about Tamara was that instead of just burdening me with the knowledge that something was wrong with me she knew the answer, and went about fixing my feet right away. This involved some minor incisions around toenails followed by a cuticle removing buffer and some general removal of dead skin and, hey presto, my toenails looked as if they may have some hope of growing longer than their beds for the first time in my adult life, and they didn’t even require polish to make them look good (but polished they were in the communal area after my treatment).
I was sent on my way with aftercare instructions that I must bathe my feet in salt water once a day and then rub Savlon around my nails. I will need to visit again in two months but the length between visits varies for everyone – as I said, my feet were pretty dire.
Five days have passed and my feet have genuinely never looked better. But this isn’t all about looks. The real difference this medi pedi made is that I am now able to cram my feet into tight boots and not feet the pinch of my toenails digging in, a pinch infinitely more uncomfortable than that which you will feel after parting with what now seems little cash for a lot of comfort.
Here is the advice I took away for healthy feet in the future (not only for women – 35% of Dabbs clients are men):
1) The single best thing you can do for your feet daily is to moisturise them, and do it with a moisturiser intended for feet. The skin there is so much thicker that a normal body moisturiser just won’t cut it. Dabbs moisturiser is perfect – both anti-fungal and anti-inflammatory, whilst smelling delicious.
2) File the feet every week to 10 days while the foot is dry. A foot ought never be filed whilst wet. The Dabbs foot file has removable exfoliating strips so is ideal for hygiene. This rule also goes for cuticles – cutting them while wet involves a high risk of infection so they must be removed while dry with sterilised instruments.
3) Only use acetate-free nail polish remover to avoid stripping the nail and a solvent-free nail varnish if possible – they use Rococo polish in the salon.
