Our recent purchase of the Air Jordan 11 Space Jams brings up a great opportunity to discuss a vital issue. At one point of your life as a sneakerhead, you have been faced with this dilemma. How do you keep you icy soles from yellowing? Before looking at some potential solutions, let’s first understand the process of how our icy soles get yellow.
Whether you kept them in your closet or wore them vigorously, keeping your soles from getting yellow is quite inevitable. Why? Because the yellowing happens due to a process called oxidation. Oxidation is the combination of a substance with oxygen. Sadly, when your icy soles are exposed to oxygen, they turn yellow! How in the world can you prevent them from turning yellow then?
If you wear your shoes, yellowing of the soles can’t be avoided. So, you are going to have to accept that you are NOT going to be wearing these shoes. Now some of you guys are probably thinking: “I just paid $175 for these Space Jams, I am wearing them!”. As a collector, I personally like to buy multiple pairs of my holy grails. In this case, I wear one pair and keep the other pair on ice. But not all of us can afford more than one pair so lets discuss best ways of keep you soles icy as long as possible.
Stay off grass, dirt, gravel and things of the sort. If you are walking with your friends and they take a shortcut via the grass, do yourself a favor and walk around. It’s NOT worth it. Do not wear in the rain! Water is your worst enemy. Water will give you the nice yellow bottom for sure… No rain or snow puddles because moisture and oxygen = yellow soles.
So finally, here is a way to slow down the yellowing process…
1. Take the paper out the box. The paper contains a dye that turns the soles yellow and age your sneakers. The issue with paper is that it’s slightly acidic, you can buy 100% non acidic paper but its expensive.
2. Buy some silica gel packets and put them in your shoe box. Silica gel is most commonly encountered in everyday life as beads packed in a vapor-permeable plastic. They are used to control humidity and absorb moisture in order to avoid spoilage or degradation of goods. However, we would not suggest putting more than (4) small packs or (1) large pack in a single shoe box.
3. Sea Glow by Island Girl. Sea Glow is for all the folks out there that are victims of yellowing soles. It actually decreases the yellowing. Here are some words from the creator:
“As the inventor of Sea Glow, I thought you all might be interested in how it works, how it should be used, and the precautions you should take. Visit islandgirlproducts.com to order Sea Glow. Yellowing on the surface of white or clear synthetic rubber is due to surface oxidation and staining, and will be removed by Sea Glow or Island Girl Pink. However, yellowing that goes down deep into the sole is mainly due to the natural slightly yellow color of the rubber that, when new, is corrected by a flourescent “optical brightener”, which eventually stops working and HAS to be activated by the small amount in UV in regular daylight. By soaking down into the rubber, the highly flourescent additives in Sea Glow will neutralize the yellowness, but only in the presence of sunlight. Once this has happened, the rubber will stay this way as long as it sees daylight every few days (sort of like a battery being charged). On solid white rubber, the Sea Glow does not need to penetrate very far at all.”
What do you do to keep your soles from yellowing?
