The Humble Aglet

February 17, 2025

At its essence, a shoelace is just a piece of string. It doesn’t matter what it looks like, all shoelaces share the common purpose of keeping your shoes (or boots) securely on your feet. In order to make use of this wonderful invention, you need to be able to thread it through all of those holes in your footwear. That’s where the humble aglet comes into play. It’s the little metal or plastic end that keeps the shoelace from unravelling. Without one, the end starts to come apart and it isn’t long before it starts to look like a pom pom. If pom poms are what you’re after, then it’s not so bad but if that’s not the look you’re going for it’s pretty unsightly.

The aglets on my boots came off and for months the pom poms on the ends just kept growing. It’s not the look I was going for. It was pretty unsightly. I contemplated buying new laces but then I remembered that I could just buy some aglets to fix the problem. For the price of $0.40 per end, I was able to save an otherwise perfect set of shoelaces. That’s a pretty good deal.

I wrapped a piece of tape on the frayed end so that I could feed the aglet over top. I positioned the aglet past the frayed section and then gently heated the plastic over a candle. I got a little too close to the candle on the first one and it discoloured it a little. I did much better on the second one. Then I clipped off the frayed bits and they’re just like new.