SOLE SEARCHING

Lucy Smith on top foot creams for combating cracked heels

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If the soles of your feet feel dry and your heels are cracked, you need a good foot cream to heal and revitalise your skin.

However, different foot issues have different needs.

I spoke to Kaser Nazir, a consultant podiatrist at Jorja Healthcare Group, about the right ingredients for each foot problem. To target skin thickening, calluses and corns, Nazir recommends using a foot cream that contains "active ingredients, such as salicylic acid and urea to help soften hard skin".

If you want to address cracked heels, look out for urea, glycerin and ceramides in the formula. "Urea is important to help maintain your skin's natural moisture barrier," says Nazir.

"Glycerin can also be beneficial because it's a humectant, so it works to strengthen the skin barrier and seal in moisture, and ceramides are also good because they're fatty acids, which help to strengthen the skin barrier and soften dry skin." All those ingredients are present in moisturisers and hand creams, so it's tempting to just repurpose those, but feet need special attention. If you've noticed inflammation and redness, this could "be caused by a number of things; however, a skin infection - either fungal or bacterial - is usually most likely", says Nazir. To address this, he suggests looking to antifungal ingredients: "Clotrimazole, miconazole, and terbinafine are antifungal agents that work by inhibiting fungal growth or killing the fungus".

That's a lot to bear in mind if you aren't an expert. That's why I've spent the past few months testing a range of different formulas to find creams that can transform your feet. Because of its mix of key ingredients, I think that the Eucerin dry skin urearepair plus 10 per cent urea foot cream is the best option on the market, but there are lots of other good choices.

How I tested