Revealed: The actual number of shoes British women own - and it's a lot

The latest research shows that the average cost of a woman’s footwear collection is £603 with 79 per cent admitting to having one or more pair of shoes they have never worn

Britain’s fashion -conscious women own an average 24 pairs of shoes, trainers and boots as their love affair with footwear continues to grow, according to a new report today.

For the latest research shows that the average cost of a woman’s footwear collection is £603 - up by almost 25per cent from three years ago when women’s had 20 pairs which cost them on average £490.

But over nine out of ten women - 92 per cent - confess to owning at least two pairs of shoes that they have not worn for a year or more, while 79 per cent of those questioned admit they had one or more brand new pair of shoes in the closet that they had never worn.

The most popular colour for “unworn” shoes is red, closely followed by pink.

The most popular colour for 'unworn' shoes is red (Photo: penguenstok)

The main reason for new shoes never coming out of the box, according to 63 per cent of women is that the colour doesn’t match any of their outfits - yet ironically the top motivation given for buying fashion footwear is to “match a specific outfit”, cited by 57 per cent.

The survey of more than 2,000 UK women by fashion retailer Simply Be found that women on average wear just three favourite pairs of shoes on a daily basis and have a total of five pairs they wear once a week.

Red shoes are the ones most likely to be left in a brand new unopened box, closely followed by those in shades of pink.

In the case of shoes that have fallen out of favour with their owners, the most common problem is the height of the heels, with almost half of women (49%) saying they have pairs that they no longer wear because the heels are “too high” to wear safely or comfortably.

Red shoes are the ones most likely to be left in a brand new unopened box (Photo: Getty)

Shoes that are “too tight” or cause “blisters” affect 31%, while one in five (19%) say they have abandoned footwear because it “looked dated” or is “no longer fashionable”.

Nine out of ten women (91%) admit buying shows on impulse and a third (34%) said they had bought a pair to wear for a special occasion and never worn the shoes again.

However, it seems many people feel guilty about their unused shoes, as more than half of women say they are keeping pairs they don’t wear because they feel it would be a “waste of money” to get rid of them and they “might” wear them again.

The lure of beautiful shoes is so strong among young women that two thirds (65%) of those aged 18 - 35, say they would ignore painful feet to wear the “perfect pair” on a night out.

Women own a lot of shoes

Less than one in two women aged 55 plus would do the same. Nearly seven in ten women (68%) say they prefer shoe shopping to buying clothes.

Jenni Bamford of Simply Be said: “There is so much choice in the footwear market with a wide range of fabrics and patterns and more effort is put into searching for just the right pair to go with a certain outfit.”

“It’s easy to get it wrong if you don’t have the outfit with you and then think the shoes will work with something else. Red is a colour that is particularly hard to get right as there are so many different shades, but like pink, it’s a colour a lot of us love so I can understand why women splash out on shoes in those hues.

“The great thing is that there are now so many beautiful and affordable shoes available to suit every budget that people can afford to expand and experiment with their footwear collections in ways previous generations could only dream of.

“I was a bit surprised to see the average number of pairs of shoes women own, but then I counted up the number of pairs I have at home and was amazed, not only by the total, but by how many I have that I never wear.”