You’ve seen the sign a thousand times: ‘No street shoes allowed on pool deck.’ To prevent dirt from being tracked into the pool area, most swimming pools require you to leave your regular shoes in the locker room. This means you need to change to pool sandals of some kind. You could go barefoot if it’s allowed, but pool footwear offers two important benefits (which is why it’s often required): safety and foot health.
The area at the edge of the pool is usually wet, of course, and whether the surface is cement or tile, it tends to get slippery, and that can be dangerous even if you always walk carefully. No one wants a cracked tailbone! Pool sandals can give you better grip on wet surfaces.
The other reason to wear footwear is to protect your feet from the bacteria and other microorganisms that love to grow in warm, damp environments like the grout around pool tiles. No matter how clean your pool looks, or how upscale the setting, there is likely some microscopic unpleasantness growing somewhere. It’s inevitable in a public space. Everyone knows about athlete’s foot (it got its name from its tendency to spread via locker rooms, after all), but you can pick up other conditions at the pool as well. Plantar warts, which are caused by a virus…
