The other day we started a little science experiment and put some Sock Stop* on a sacrificial sock to see if it might make knitted slippers less slippery. I left it to dry for a couple of days and am back with results!

The short version is it makes the surface much grippier…but I can for sure feel it underfoot. The longer version is slightly more nuanced.

So, this goes on a lot like glue or puffy paint. In order to have the non-slip effect, you need to put it on thick enough that you get a smooth, solid, uninterrupted stretch of the product (like the larger dots close to the toe of the sock). If you do that, those smooth spots are, indeed, quite grippy (they also seem to stay white or very slightly translucent, rather than drying transparent like the label says).

However, you (or at least I) can absolutely feel them under foot. But I’m autistic as hell and tend to feel all my clothes all the time. It’s quite possible you are less particular about your footwear (though I strongly suspect a whole damn lot of you are also autistic, so maybe not).

I’d say if you can feel a piece of rice in your shoe when you have socks on, you’re going to be able to feel these dots. If that would bother you, this probably will too. If you can’t feel that (or it doesn’t bother you), then this might be a good product for you.

For me, the sensation is a deal breaker, so (again, for me, you are the boss of your toes) this isn’t a viable product. But then again I don’t find knitted slippers all that slippery, so I’m not willing to make them annoying in the quest to make them grippier. That sensitivity vs benefit analysis is going to be different for everyone, and you get to decide for yourself which is more important.

Now, you may notice that up at the top of the sock I smushed the paint into the fabric. I had a suspicion I’d be able to feel the dots and hoped this would be less noticeable underfoot. And it is! But smushing the product into the fabric means it doesn’t make that smooth, uninterrupted expanse of product, so you don’t get the grip. Plus it makes the underlying fabric much stiffer and takes up all the stretch. So that’s not really a solution either.

I can envision making a thick puddle over the entire area where your foot touches the floor. That way it would be a solid surface underfoot (so you wouldn’t feel the texture change where you go on and off the dots) and would have the continuous expanse of product (so it would still be grippy). It would mean those bits weren’t stretchy, but most slippers are probably stretchy enough on the top that they’d still fit. I might try that on the heel of this one in a little while just to see what happens.

But first, I’m going to wash this one a couple times to see how it holds up and then run it through the dryer a few times too (with suitable precautions, I’m not ruining a load of clothes if I can help it). Because data collection is an important part of science, and we’ve come this far so we might as well continue the experiment.

Lemme know if you have more questions/more ways we might experiment on the sock (you can watch me slide it around there too to try and demonstrate the relative grippiness) and I’ll see what else I can find out along the way!

*As always, amazon is the devil and is actively harming all of us. If you want this stuff and can find it at a local shop, buy it there instead if that’s feasible for you (because that’s how you keep having local shops). But if it’s not (I get it, I live in a rural area and the closest shop that miiiight have it is an hour away, so doing that would involve a minimum of two and a half hours of my time and ten bucks of gas), and you’re gonna get it from the bad guys, you can use that link and they’ll give a tiny sliver of the money they make to me. Or you can totally just put Sock Stop into the search engine of your choice and find it somewhere else!