So you’ve got gum stuck on your shoe.
Congratulations. Why? Well, it could be worse. You could have ripped a large hole in your shoe. You could have stepped on some of the neighbor’s dogs “lawn contributions”.
Needless to say, stepping on chewing gum is a pretty common occurence, especially for those folks who frequent areas with a high gum-to-concrete ratio. Public venues like bathrooms, baseball stadiums, and mall parking lots are prime areas for coming down with a case of gum-shoe-itis.
So how do you remove that gum from your once pristine shoe sole?
I’ve read a ton of different methods on the web, many of which involve either oil or automotive sprays. The first thing you probably want to do is to try and remove it without using any other chemical methods. The quality and age of the gum and the type of sole that your shoe has play important roles on whether this will be successful.
For gum that’s not really sticky, you might just be able to scrape the bottom of your shoe on an edge like the side of the curb to get it off. Shoes with completely flat soles with no ridges seem to work the best with this method. If you’re wearing basketball shoes or shoes that have soles with a lot of indentations or ridges, then you might have a hard time. In fact, rubbing the shoe sole might drive the gum further into the ridges! If the gum is not so sticky, you can try taking a stick and prying the gum out of the ridges of the shoe. Also, the longer that the gum is left on the sole and stepped on, the deeper it will get wedged into any nooks and crannies.
