It's pretty safe to say that summer has ruined my feet. I've been living in flip flops and while this might be good for the inside of my feet, it's made the outsides pretty crusty. Yeugh!

As mum to a nearly 10 month old, taking time to beautify all parts of my body just doesn't happen and I mostly have to strategically pick the most obvious bits to focus on. And it's not just time. I can't afford to go for manicures, pedicures, waxes and hair salon trips, so yes, things like my feet are suffering.

As a result I've put together my own quick home pedicure which I need to do every couple of weeks to stop a backslide. The only thing I don't do is trim back the nail cuticles.

Here is one of my icky feet before:

1. If you've got hard skin on heels and balls of your feet, start by using a stainless steel foot file like this one from Fragrancedirect.com to get the worst of the tough skin off and to soften it up for treatment.

2. Next, use a smoothing foot file to get right down to the soft skin underneath. You should use this all over your foot including the tips of your toes. I use the rough side first and then the smoother side to finish. This one from Boots should do the job.

3. After you've exposed all that new skin you need to offer it some TLC with a deep moisturising treatment. There are any number of specialist foot moisturisers you could use, but I've found rather randomly that Superdrug's new mum nipple cream at 99p is great for this. And it doubles as a hand cream too.

4. Give the moisturiser a couple of minutes to sink in and then treat your feet to some tingly minty foot gel like Amphora's Peppermint Foot Gel.  Or if you have a willing partner, a foot massage with a lovely coconutty oil is fab. I'm still working on this with my husband but it is my birthday soon so fingers crossed :-)

5. Now turn your attention to your toes. Trim your nails and file them with your usual tools. Then pick a fun nail polish to cheer you up - one that's tough enough to take a beating for a week or two! I like this range from ORLY. Though I'm slightly regretting my choice of green so I might be changing that!

Here is my foot after:





















I did this during Lucy's nap and in total it took me 15 minutes which isn't bad - I even had time for a cup of tea and a biscuit afterwards!

RL xx