The Universal Wet Shoe Problem
If you've ever been here, you know the panic. Your only pair of work boots is soaked. You need them in the morning. Or your kid's cleats are dripping after practice and there's another game tomorrow. Or you came home from a hike and your trail runners feel like aquariums.
There are a lot of folk methods for drying wet shoes. Some of them work. Some of them ruin your shoes. And some of them work but take so long they don't actually solve your problem — your shoes are dry by the time you no longer need them dry.
Here's an honest, ranked walk-through of every method, with the tradeoffs each one comes with.
The Goal: Move Moisture Out, Don't Cook the Shoe
Before we get into methods, the principle: drying a shoe is a moisture transport problem. Water needs to move from inside the lining and foam, to the surface, and then into the air. Two things govern how fast that happens: airflow (the rate at which moist air is replaced with dry air) and temperature (warmer air holds more moisture).
Crucially, you do not want to cook the shoe. Most performance shoes are held together by adhesives that fail above ~120°F. EVA midsole foam permanently deforms when overheated. Leather cracks. The dryer is a tempting tool, but it's the fastest way to destroy a $150 pair of shoes.
So the goal is fast moisture transport at safe temperatures. With that in mind, let's rank the methods.
Method 1: Forced-Air Fan Drying — Best Overall
Time to dry: 60–120 minutes
Risk to shoes: Essentially zero
Cost: Low (and reusable forever)
Sustained airflow at room temperature is the gold standard. A small fan blowing into the opening of a shoe — ideally with a tube or nozzle that gets the air *inside* the shoe — pulls moisture out faster than any passive method, without heat damage.
The reason this works so well is that even at room temperature, dry air can absorb a lot of moisture; the limiting factor is *replacement*. Stagnant air saturates and stops absorbing. A fan keeps replacing the saturated air with fresh dry air, so the shoe never reaches equilibrium with its environment.
This is the same principle behind every commercial boot dryer, the Peet Dryer (a popular brand in cold-weather and outdoor circles), and the dryers used by ski resorts, hockey rinks, and military bases. It works, it's safe, and it's been validated by people whose livelihood depends on having dry boots tomorrow morning.
The catch: off-the-shelf shoe dryers are usually built for one or two pairs at a time. If you have a household with six pairs of cleats, three pairs of work shoes, and a swim bag full of damp gear, a single-pair dryer is a bottleneck. Modular fan systems (this is the gap Dried It is built for) let you scale that capacity to whatever your household actually generates.
Method 2: Newspaper Stuffing — Decent for Mild Wetness
Time to dry: 8–24 hours
Risk to shoes: Very low
Cost: Free (if you have newspaper)
The classic. Stuff each shoe full of crumpled newspaper, replace the paper every few hours, repeat until dry. The newspaper absorbs moisture from the lining; replacing it removes that moisture from the system.
It works, especially for damp (not soaked) shoes. The downsides are slow speed, the need to babysit the process, ink smudging on light-colored linings, and the fact that it does almost nothing for the foam in the midsole — only the inner cavity gets meaningfully drier.
Use case: emergency, no fan available, shoes are damp not drenched, you have all night.
Method 3: Rice — A Myth That Won't Die
Time to dry: 12–24 hours
Risk to shoes: Low (other than rice everywhere)
Cost: A lot of rice
Rice gets recommended constantly for drying wet phones, and it migrated over to shoes by association. It's mediocre at best for both. Rice absorbs surface moisture from things in direct contact with it, but the absorption is slow and the contact area inside a shoe is small. You're better off with newspaper, which has more surface area and gets pressed against the lining.
Skip the rice unless you have nothing else. And maybe don't put it in expensive trail runners.
Method 4: A Heated Dryer or Dryer Sheets — Don't
Time to dry: 30–60 minutes
Risk to shoes: High to severe
Cost: A new pair of shoes when you wreck this one
We have to mention this because it's all over Pinterest. Yes, you can throw shoes in your clothes dryer. Yes, they will be dry. Yes, you will have potentially destroyed them in the process.
Heat above ~120°F starts breaking down the adhesives that hold shoes together. EVA midsoles can permanently compress and lose their cushioning. The mechanical tumbling cracks leather, snaps stitching, and bashes up sole geometry. Manufacturer warranties on running shoes from brands like Brooks, Hoka, and Asics explicitly exclude damage from machine drying.
Even "low heat" with a dryer rack is risky for performance shoes. If your shoes are cheap and disposable, knock yourself out. If they're $100+ running shoes you want to last 500 miles, do not put them in the clothes dryer.
Method 5: Sunshine — Free But Slow and Inconsistent
Time to dry: 4–8 hours, weather permitting
Risk to shoes: Moderate (UV fading, heat damage on hot days)
Cost: Free
Sunlight does two useful things: it provides direct heat, and UV is bactericidal (the same study from the Cleveland Clinic notes UV's role in killing the bacteria that produce foot odor).
But sunlight comes with caveats. It's weather-dependent — useless on the rainy day you most need it. Direct hot sun can fade and crack synthetic uppers and dry leather out brittle. And in humid climates, the air is so saturated that sun-drying alone is surprisingly slow.
Use case: dry sunny day, shoes are casual, you have time. Don't use it for dark dyed leather or premium running shoes.
Method 6: Hair Dryer — Quick Spot Treatment
Time to dry: 20–40 minutes if you babysit the whole time
Risk to shoes: Moderate (heat damage if you don't move it)
Cost: Already in your bathroom
A hair dryer set to cool or low-warm, held away from the shoe and constantly moving, can dry the inside of a shoe reasonably fast. The catch is you have to *hold the hair dryer*. For 30 minutes. Per shoe. While not letting the heat dwell anywhere long enough to do damage.
It works in a pinch. It does not work as a system. If you're drying shoes regularly, you don't want a process that requires you to physically stand there.
Method 7: Dehumidifier in a Closet — Slow and Ambient
Time to dry: 12–24 hours
Risk to shoes: None
Cost: Moderate (the dehumidifier)
If you live somewhere humid and you already run a dehumidifier in a closet or basement, you can drop wet shoes in that space and let the lower ambient humidity slowly pull moisture out. It's slow, but it's gentle and passive.
This is a good *background* solution but a bad *acute* solution. It won't get you cleats dry by tomorrow morning, but it will help your shoes never get dangerously damp in the first place.
How to Pick Your Method
Need them dry by morning, want zero damage: Forced-air fan drying. Every time. The other methods exist, but if you have access to a fan dryer, this is the answer.
Soaked, no fan available: Newspaper, change every 2 hours, repeat overnight.
Cheap shoes you don't care about: Whatever's fastest. Just don't do this with your good ones.
Persistent dampness in a humid climate: Dehumidifier as a baseline, plus fan drying for acute wettings.
You dry gear all the time (parent of athletes, work boots in rough conditions, multi-sport household): A modular drying system you can scale to as many pairs as you need at once. Single-pair commercial dryers will become your bottleneck almost immediately.
The Bigger Picture
Most people accept slow drying as just how things are. They throw their shoes by the door, hope for the best, and shrug when the shoes are still damp the next morning. The smell, the wear, the bacterial growth, and the early replacement costs all flow from that acceptance.
Get a system. Cut your drying times by 10x. Stop replacing shoes you only ruined because they never properly dried. The math on this is brutally good once you do it: a $30–$60 fan-based dryer pays for itself the first time it saves a $130 pair of running shoes.
And if your household is generating more wet gear than a single-pair dryer can keep up with — that's the exact problem we built Dried It to solve.