UKC

The Scarpa Origin VS gives a contrasting set of features, with a flat, forgiving and neutral last that's designed to fit pretty much everyone alongside super sticky rubber, and some features you might not expect from a beginner shoe, such as an M50 rubber toe patch, which is increasingly useful for people climbing indoors.

What would really improve these videos, is 2 key bits of data: how long and how wide are the reviewer's feet? The reviewer could then say I wore size "x" and they were tight / OK / loose. 

See pics below - I kept my socks on because it's coming up to tea time.

Brilliant idea.

I'm tempted to get a pair for thin cracks. Currently using Scarpa Force, these are potentially even better. The perfect size for me, from trying on a 41 and 42, would be 41.5. But I don't think you can get half sizes.

Totally agree, pretty sure I said this last year too.  You can now get a 3d scan of your foot in decathlon but UKC still relates size in adjective measures. "I'm a 9 in street shoes and usually an 42.5 in brogues, and I have feet shaped like dodecahedron, so I downsized by 1 to get a standard fit."

Thanks. I always think phrases like 'relaxed fit' and 'medium volume' are absolutely meaningless without some objective data.

In practise though the information you are after is meaningless, because I doubt 99% of our audience knows the actual length and width of their feet in cm and even if they did - if they were any bigger or smaller the information would be irrelevant. 

On the flip side, broad terms such as high, medium or low volume and wide, medium or narrow are something that the vast majority can understand. If you don't understand those - and where you fit within them - then I fail to see what a more precise set of measurements would bring to the table. Those terms are easily scaleable too, because a wide shoe is wide throughout its size range.

At the end of the day though, this is why we always says try before you buy, because there's always nuance to fit - I'm just not sure that the details you are after are the details that anyone would actually benefit from or understand. 

Well Rob I do believe you have shot yourself in the foot there. You say "nobody knows their real foot width" but Until you have measured your feet and compared the results against averages, how do you know that they are broad / narrow? Without this comparison your only defining yourself based of what you perceive. 

I always thought I should wear UK 10 trainers. Then one day I measured my feet, turns out I measured at just under 8.5 or better yet 267mm. My what I thought were undersized climbing shoes where actually oversized and could have been vastly improved by downsizing.  

Not everyone can get to a shop to try on shoes and even worse you can't really climb in them to really try them. There are so many shoes out there now that a bit more data in reviews wouldn't go amiss.

I agree broad terms are useful, but only when used against clearly defined baselines. Scarpa's narrow may be a lasportiva wide. 

Thanks for the suggestion.

On the face of it this is a good idea. But only until you give it more thought.

In your example pictures you've measured your foot at the broadest and longest points. This doesn't tell you much (anything?) about how you'll fit any particular shoe.

Since feet are so irregularly shaped, you might have any combination of dimensions elsewhere on the foot: the forefoot could be comparatively wide, or quite narrow; the heel might be broad or narrow; you could have a very long big toe, or several toes more even in length. A foot could be relatively square shaped at the toe, biased towards the big toe (like yours) or with a longer second toe. Different volumes? Bunions? High arches, or flat? It probably goes on.

Which of these dimensions should we provide - assuming these are even available from the manufacturer? If we offered just the max width and max length, as you seem to suggest, I'm certain that would be next to useless for potential buyers. 

And would we offer the same data for every different size of shoe and in both men's and women's (lower volume, generally) versions? That's a long list of numbers, of dubious merit.

As with human feet, shoe shapes vary a lot, from neutral/symmetric to radically bent and asymmetric. And any number of small variations in the rest of the shape. Telling you simply the biggest dimension for each shoe would totally miss that vital nuance.

When it comes to providing info on fit in a review, we can only practically offer very generalised guidance to key attributes such as the profile, symmetry, width and volume. These are only going to be described in approximately relative terms to other shoes on the market, and with some passing reference to how they fit the reviewer, since we're reviewing them as users.

Shoe reviewing is a difficult balance of subjective and objective, and until we develop some funky 3-D computer modelling for UKC (we're not going to do that) I think we've got the balance as good as we can.

If we've said shoe X is narrow and pointy, and you've got a wide square foot, then you would probably not pick that model to try on first (though always be open minded, you really never know til you try...)

The buyer simply can't rely on a review alone, there's leg work to do for themselves too. Shoe fitting is not (yet?) an exact science, and as Rob has said, the only way to be sure is to personally go to a shop and try a load on.

100% of climbers would have access to a tape measure though.