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I Almost Didn’t Write This
Let me be upfront about something: I debated whether to write this piece for a long time.
Not because the experience wasn’t worth writing about — it was, more than I expected. But because there’s a certain vulnerability in admitting that you spent a month deliberately wearing shoes designed to make you taller. It feels like confessing to something. Like admitting that you care about your height. That you’ve thought about it. That it’s ever bothered you.
And here’s the thing — it has. Not in a way that kept me up at night, not in a way I’d call a crisis. But if I’m being honest, as a 5’8” man in a world that quietly rewards height in ways we rarely discuss openly, it’s crossed my mind more than once. At job interviews. On first dates. Walking into a room full of people I didn’t know.
So when I decided to try a pair of Chamaripa elevator shoes for thirty days — shoes with a hidden internal lift that add a few inches without anyone knowing — I told myself I was doing it as an experiment. A social experiment. A piece of journalism, almost.
What I didn’t expect was what it would actually teach me.
Week One: The Self-Consciousness I Didn’t Anticipate
The shoes arrived in a plain box. From the outside, they looked like any other well-crafted leather derby shoes — dark brown, clean lines, the kind of shoe you’d wear to a work presentation or a dinner you actually care about. Nothing about the exterior suggested anything unusual.
I put them on and immediately felt the difference. Not dramatic — about 7 centimetres — but noticeable enough. I stood in front of the mirror for longer than I’d like to admit.
The first few days were strange in a way I hadn’t predicted. I felt self-conscious — not because anyone was looking at me differently, but because I was thinking about it constantly. Every time I walked past a reflective surface, I was aware of the shoes. Every time someone stood next to me, I was quietly measuring. It felt a little like wearing a secret.
By the end of week one, something had shifted slightly. The secret started to feel less like a liability and more like a private piece of information. Something I knew that no one else did. And that, unexpectedly, felt kind of interesting.
Week Two: When Nobody Noticed, Everything Changed
Here’s what I expected to happen in week two: someone would notice. A colleague would glance at my shoes and raise an eyebrow. A friend would ask why I seemed taller. Someone would figure it out.
Nobody did.
Not a single person commented on my height, my shoes, or anything that suggested they had any awareness of what I was wearing. The shoes looked like shoes. I looked like myself — just, apparently, a version of myself that stood a little straighter.
And that’s when the psychological shift really started.
When you realise that no one is scrutinising you — that the self-consciousness you’ve been carrying around is almost entirely self-generated — something loosens. I started paying less attention to how I was being perceived and more attention to how I was showing up. The conversations I was having. The way I was engaging with people.
I’ve read enough psychology to know that posture affects confidence, and confidence affects outcomes. But reading about it and experiencing it are different things. Something about feeling physically taller — even by a few centimetres, even through a mechanism nobody else could see — was changing the way I was moving through the world.
Week Three: The Deeper Question
By week three, I was wearing the shoes without thinking about them. They’d become part of the routine — like a good watch or a well-fitting jacket. Just another element of getting dressed in the morning.
But the experiment had started asking me harder questions.
Why does height matter so much to how men perceive themselves? Why had I spent years dimly aware of my 5’8” frame in a way that occasionally flickered into genuine discomfort? And what did it say about me — about all of us, really — that a few centimetres of hidden lift could produce a measurable shift in confidence?
I don’t think the answer is simple, and I don’t think elevator shoes are the answer to the complicated relationship many men have with their physical presence. But I started to think about the ways we quietly penalise men for not meeting a physical standard they had no hand in setting. The studies that show taller men earn more, get promoted faster, are perceived as more authoritative in leadership roles. The cultural shorthand that equates physical stature with competence.
None of that is fair. And none of it is something a pair of shoes fixes.
But here’s what I kept coming back to: we don’t criticise men for getting a haircut that makes them feel better about themselves. We don’t question a man who wears a well-tailored suit because it makes him stand taller and feel more confident. We don’t interrogate the logic of any of the dozens of small choices men make every day to present their best selves. Why is this different?
Week Four: What I Actually Took Away
By the final week, the shoes had faded into the background of my life in the best possible way. I wore them some days. I didn’t, others. The choice stopped feeling loaded.
What stayed with me wasn’t really about the shoes at all.
It was about the gap between how we perceive ourselves and how we’re actually perceived. About the enormous amount of mental energy many men quietly spend on physical insecurities that nobody else is tracking nearly as closely as we are. About the way confidence — real confidence, the kind that changes how you move and speak and engage with people — can be cultivated through small, deliberate acts of self-care.
The shoes were a catalyst. If you’re curious, the kind of elevator shoes for confidence I wore are more refined than you might expect — built for men who want the benefit without the compromise on style or comfort. But that’s almost beside the point.
What the thirty days really gave me was a useful piece of distance from my own self-consciousness — and that distance turned out to be exactly what I needed to look at it clearly.
Sometimes the most revealing experiments are the ones you almost don’t do because you’re worried about what they say about you.
This one said something I wasn’t expecting: that I was harder on myself than the situation required. And that, at least, felt worth knowing.
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