Coffee and the fight against smelly feet

One is a thing of beauty and great taste and the other…well they’re smelly socks.

One enterprising organisation in the United States has managed somehow to take one and make the other better so to speak. One person has gone as far as to describe the new socks as a ‘Brita filter for your feet’.

So what is it all about then? The Atlas performance socks are manufactured from a mix of cotton, recycled polyester and carbonised coffee, which itself is reclaimed from coffee roasters and shops and then recycled into the yarns that the socks are made from. The carbonised coffee is essential in filtering and absorbing sweat and odour and also keeps your feet cool, exactly the way a Brita filter works with water.

Here’s the science bit: carbonised coffee ‘attracts molecules’ (composed mostly of carbon) with its spongy structure. The trapped molecules are released in the wash, ready for a whole new dose of smells the next time they’re worn.

But don’t worry your feet aren’t going to smell of coffee as that aroma has been removed first. The product was introduced via a Kickstarter campaign