You have been saying the same shoe size for about thirty years.

It comes out of you in a store without a thought, the way your birthday does. Seven and a half. Six. Whatever yours is. You have said it to so many salespeople that it has stopped being a measurement and become a fact about you, like your eye color.

For many women reading this, it's been wrong for a decade.

The foot it describes no longer exists.

Your foot changed shape

Feet keep changing long after twenty-five.

The arch is held up by soft tissue, and soft tissue gives in slowly under fifty or sixty years of standing, walking, carrying, and being stood on. As the arch lowers, the foot spreads. It gets wider across the ball. It also gets a little longer, because a flatter arch puts more of the foot on the floor.

MedlinePlus, the patient-facing service of the US National Library of Medicine, puts it in six words: feet tend to flatten with age.

At the same time, the padding thins. A cushion of fat sits under the heel and under the b…

The Size You Have Been Saying for Thirty…

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