How I Accidentally Became a Foot Fetish Model

“A lady I know is about to shoot for a shoe company and she’s looking for a white girl with pretty feet to model their shoes.” This message, from a work friend on Instagram, is how it all started. He said he reached out because he knew I modelled and the pay was “stupidly good”. The shoe company was big, and I knew him well enough that the story was plausible. He needed shots of me with and without shoes for the casting, so I casually obliged, sending him photos with the message: “This is jokes.” Even today, I squirm at my naivety.

I didn’t get that job, but there was another casting soon after: “It’s a FaceTime of you basically putting lotion on your feet.” That’s when the alarm bells finally started ringing. He said it was just the plan for the next campaign, but I began to worry he’d accidentally made himself into a foot pimp. I tried to look out for him: I told him he needed to be careful and that this woman might be trying to scam him.

Two years later, he messaged again and it finally clicked that he wasn’t as naive as I’d thought. I was mortified that I'd let him pull the wool over my eyes, but now, as a journalist, I decided to play along and turn my ordeal into content – a broke freelancer’s dream.

This time “the woman” offered me £6,000 to record a video on FaceTime with him. He sent me a video we’d be recreating: A guy in the corner watching on with glee at a woman scrunching her toes and wiggling her feet into the camera lens. He told me the guy needs to “get excited”, so his hands would be going down his trousers. “Easy right?” he said.

When I asked him what he’d done with the original pictures I sent two years ago, and if he’d made money, he maintained they were just the audition for the modelling job. When I questioned his offer of £6,000 for one video, he laughed. “I mean it’s not one video, Elizabeth, but like, the first is one of many,” he said. Then he moved swiftly onto the practicalities of nail polish changes.

He asked multiple times to do a practice shoot, and the more he asked, the more obvious it was that there was never a woman involved. I used the FaceTime as an opportunity to ply him with more questions. The goal posts moved again when he said he might be getting his “piece out”. I refused to do the practice run and demanded the woman contact me personally about the job. She never did, of course, but one of the final messages I received from this work friend read:

“Elizabeth, just spoke to her to say you’re interested. She wants three out of the six videos to be done in person and she wants semi footjob kinda stuff. I said I’ll pull you out of the job and I will get another girl to do it with me… That’s cool? Right?”

Even if I’d followed through, I’m sure I’d never have been paid the six grand. But it did make me wonder: Could I earn similarly big bucks if I opened myself up to this world?

“I have a vanilla job to pay my bills, then my foot money pays for thrills,” says Summer Solesis, a 26-year-old “foot goddess” and content creator. “I make easily over $500 a month from my feet.” Within six months of starting a foot-themed Instagram account, she gained 24,000 followers, but it soon got shut down. She now uses Reddit and Twitter to market her foot fetish OnlyFans page: “I was curious if people were actually out there making money off pictures or if it was all a joke.”

What exactly is the appeal, though? Ness Cooper, a clinical sexologist specialising in BDSM, sex work and polyamorous relationships, says that feet physically remind some people of genitals. “Toes can represent a phallic-like appearance, while the ripples in the skin on feet can be associated with the folds of the vulva,” she says. “But feet also have many nerve endings in them, and some of these are actually linked to the genitals, as well as the pleasure part of the brain.”

In order to explore the potential of my own feet as a side hustle, I made myself a profile on OnlyFans, Twitter and Reddit under the name Solemate. Next, I needed to find a USP.

Psychologist, sex and intimacy coach Dr. Lori Beth Bisbey explains that the most sought after attributes are smelly feet, sweaty feet, high arches and pretty toes. “High arches and pretty feet can represent heightened femininity, whereas desiring smelly feet is often about humiliation,” she says. “For many, it’s about worshipping the owner of the feet.”

Riffing off the idea of power play and contrasts to pretty feet, I decided my point of difference would be a “Sole Destroyer” section – alongside general pictures of my feet – where I’d crush random items of food, like a loaf of bread or a cherry bakewell.

Within about five minutes of setting up the Instagram account, and uploading a photo with some hashtags, I got a DM. It escalated quickly and in minutes he was asking to “kiss my soles” and rub his face all over my feet. When he asked if he could “get under my chair”, my account got suspended. 

Twitter seemed to be the only app with any luck: I had multiple men asking to be my sugar daddy in the first half hour, but sadly all asked me to send them money first to prove I was “loyal” and “legit”. Many men (and it was only male profiles who contacted me) just tried their luck with dirty talk. “Wanna know a secret? I used to go swimming every week just to see feet,” one started with. But this wasn’t going to help me pay my rent – I needed cold, hard Paypal transfers.

“The most popular requests I get are videos of my dirty soles and humiliation,” advises Summer Solesis. “I created a mystery box for $500 a few times, and that usually consists of things like toenail clippings, a Ped Egg filled with dried skin, old shoes, maybe something I’ve stepped on like a bagel that someone wants to eat, some spit – it gets interesting.”

I felt uncomfortable demanding money, but also with how vulnerable posting pictures online made me feel with captions like, “I’ve been very fucking naughty… Now who’s going to lick my dirty feet?” But I soldiered on – alas, to no avail. Every time I mentioned paying for content, the men would go quiet. I tried everything to please fans, but every last one ended up being a scammer. I earned precisely zero pounds.

I take my hat off to anyone who manages to make money from this – truly, I am in awe. It’s  an extremely time consuming process, from actually taking the photos, to dodging exploitation and scammers. The sheer amount of marketing you need to push your page feels astronomical. I persisted for about six months before concluding this investigation might need the boot. 

I may not have made any money, but I certainly gained a new level of appreciation for the lack of respect sex workers receive and how quick people are to exploit others online. This article is not about kink shaming or humiliating people who do have foot fetishes, but rather the line of consent and why where you get your material from is so important. If you want a service, then the provider deserves to be paid. There are a lot of misconceptions about selling foot pictures as an easy way to make quick cash. In my case, I might be waiting years for my toes to even be able to re-buy all the food they crushed for content, let alone help get me out of the cost of living crisis.

@ElizabethMcCaf