How to Repair High Heel Shoes

Learning how to repair high heel shoes can take the edge off of one major pain of tall shoes: loose, broken, or worn down heels.

A broken heel doesn't have to be tragic.

The easiest way to handle having to learn how to repair high heel shoes is to never need to learn how. Unfortunately, even if you do walk properly on them all the time and you avoid thick carpet, stairs, tripping, and soft ground that wants to suck you in, sometimes snaps happen.

Heel repairs are no-brainers for the most part. You either purchase parts that have instructions, glue the parts together intuitively, or suck it up and take your shoes to a repair shop to make sure they're balanced correctly. You can get a couple of miles more out of your favorite pair of heels if you play your cards right!

When you do have to repair a high heel, stay off your feet for a while, at least until you can get home and really assess the damage and the effectiveness of your repair.

Yep, glue can work in a high heel emergency. You'll need something stronger than Elmer's glue, of course, but there are other options out there: Super glue and shoe glue, for example. Be liberal with it for the best hold, but don’t use so much that you cause the shoes to be unbalanced. Types of glue you can use include:

• Krazy Glue
• Super Glue
• Shoe glue (Shoe Goo)
• Elmer's Carpenter's Wood Glue

Note: if you're visiting a shoe repair store to get your glue anyway, pick up some more nails for the best results.

If the heel was just glued on before—no nails involved—scrape off the old glue before reattaching the heel with new glue. It'll keep your shoes the same height and provide a more stable foundation for the repair.

If you wanted shoes that made you wobble unsteadily and work extra hard to keep your balance in a salute to fitness, you'd have chosen FitFlops or one of their counterparts. Similar to the broken heels, you can repair loose heels with glue. Also, pick up a few extra shoe nails and pound a couple into each heel. Don’t just pay attention to the broken one; you need them both to be balanced for safety reasons and to put the least amount of stress possible on your joints.

You may or may not have had an inkling that your heel was about to break completely off. Maybe you ignored the looseness of it; maybe it broke off in one fell swoop. Either way, now you're sitting there, staring in despair because your shoe is in two pieces.

Just like with the wobbly heels mentioned above, you can glue that broken shoe back together. The only difference here is that you need to align your heel very carefully. Since it's not just loose there's no guideline for getting it on right.

Super glue. Yep, that's right! It won't be a long-term fix, but if you're nowhere near a shoe repair shop (and you probably don't carry around an extra pair of shoes even if you did work right next door to one), it'll get you by. Once you apply the glue and let it dry, tug on the heel and check to make sure it's got a strong enough hold. The reason Super Glue is so great for an impromptu heel repair is the fast dry time. Some glues may need to set overnight.

If your heel has visible nails prior to gluing the pieces back together, coat the nails with the glue and tap the pieces back together. If you can use shoe glue instead of super glue, that's even better. If you don't glue the nails, they'll slip right back out no matter how many times you reinsert them.

At home, your options aren't much different than when you're out and on the go. You can still glue your heel back on, but you have more glue options if you can allow overnight drying time. Don’t forget to rough up the two pieces that you'll be attaching together by sanding them prior to applying glue.

Stiletto heels tend to wear down over time. You will have to visit a shoe repair shop for this, but you won't have to pay them to repair it if you don’t want to. You can just pick up heel tips and put them on yourself by following the directions on the package. It's a surprisingly simple repair.

If that high heel repair just won’t stick and you don’t want to take them to a professional, by all means, use this as an excuse to go shoe shopping!.

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