My feet have peeled for as long as I can remember. It might be that I prefer not to wear shoes if I can help it and sock season is as short as possible, or it might be that I have inherited this condition from my dad who, despite wearing shoes and socks or slippers for most of his life, had terribly cracked feet. If, like me, you like slingbacks and sandals, having sore, cracked heels and soles is unsightly and, let’s put it like this, not very alluring at intimate moments either.

I’ve tried everything: I’ve used a diamond foot grater every day in the shower for 24 years and I’ve had pedicures galore, even the ones where you quake at the sight of an unsheathed razor poised and ready for action. Those rotary scrapey things that you get on the internet or from Boots only made my hard skin problem worse. So, imagine my curiosity when I spied these foot peeling masks in a mask shop in Seoul earlier this month, bewilderingly full of hundreds of different masks to treat all sorts of conditions. There was a buy 10 get 10 free offer going on but since I don’t read a word of Korean, I was a bit dubious about the wondrous claims that this product might or might not have made.

This is how I found myself later that week wearing these bootees that come with the mask packs. You tie them onto your feet, pour in the liquid in the sachets labelled left and right though I could perceive no difference between the two packs, then sit for an hour and a half while the undefined (except perhaps in Korean) liquid does its work. I mean, it could have been sulphuric acid or Pinot Grigio for all I knew but I’m perfectly willing to accept that the blame rests with me for not learning any Korean.

Ninety minutes later (a full Archers Omnibus plus Continuity remarks), my feet felt no different as I removed and binned the bootees, with severe qualms about the added environmental impact of this waste. I had expected them to be red or sore or something but they were just my feet. A little disappointed, I rinsed them, resigned to having wasted my cash and glad that I’d bought only ten.

Over the course of the next week, however, starting on the ‘plane from Dubai three days later, my feet began to peel. Not in a sore or angry way but more sullenly as a snake sheds its skin. This copuld have been messy, I grant you but not at all painful. Using my diamond grater in the shower helped control the large flakes of my rapidly-detaching soles.

Now, three weeks later, my feet look like this:

All right, they are not as soft as a baby’s derrière quite yet but we’re nearly there and they look and feel much better than for decades. One more treatment ought to be sufficient for them to cease snagging my stockings. The instructions seem to say that you should repeat the treatment every 4 days to a week but I’m sure that’s unnecessary overkill. As it is I suspect that I’ve gone down a shoe size. I wish I’d bought the full 20 masks now. Clever people, these Koreans.