Stilettos are the sharpest and most pointy type of high heels in existence. It’s not without reason that stilettos are named after daggers.
While stiletto heels are welcome in many places, they are banned in others because of the damage they can permanently inflict on innocent flooring.
Wooden floors are particularly prone to damage by stiletto heels digging into them and leaving indentations.
The reason why stilettos can damage hardwood floors like this is best answered by considering the physics of high heels.
As any physicist will tell you, pressure is defined as the amount of force divided by the area by which it is exerted. Therefore two ways to increase the amount of pressure on a point are to increase the amount of force or decrease the area.
The second of these is the key to why stiletto heels exert so much pressure. It is because the tip of the heel in which the force is concentrated is so small.
The same person wearing a sneaker or stiletto would apply the same force with each shoe because the downward force is supplied by gravity – in other words their weight.
But the pressure on the floor would be less with a sneaker because the force is spread over the whole area of the sole as it is the whole sole which contacts the floor.
Do all high heels damage wooden floors?
Not all high heels cause damage to wooden floors. One reason for this lies in the subtle difference between the tips of certain heels.
A heel that tapers to a wide blade or narrow block will have many times the contact area with the floor than the needle point of a stiletto.
Even if a non-stiletto heel is only five times wider, that means the pressure exerted is only a fifth of the stiletto. So that can make a huge difference.
Another reason why heels can sometimes not damage wooden surfaces is the strength of the wood itself. This is not just the kind of wood but also the way it is varnished or treated. Some modern wooden surfaces will withstand a lot more damage than others.
High heels have been damaging floors for a long time
The problem of spike heels damaging wooden floors is not a new one.
In 1962, the Christian Science Monitor reported of a Church of England Clergyman in Oxford UK who was worried about the damage that his heel-wearing parishioners were doing to the floor of an 11th century church.
The Reverend Oscar de Berry fixed a notice to the door of the church trying to persuade female members of the congregation to leave their heels in the porch.
The clergyman’s tribulations were reported in Minneapolis under the heading “The heel of a new tyrant”.
The article indicated that £5 worth of the damage (worth around US$160 in 2023 terms) was caused by one woman tapping her spike heels during a 20 minute sermon.
The paper did not report on whether the Reverend was considering shorter sermons as an alternative solution.