You’re standing in the shoe department with three boxes open and no idea what you’re looking at. One says stiletto, one says kitten, one says block. Two of them look almost identical and the price difference is £70. The assistant asks what kind of heel you want and you say “just, a normal one”.
Fair enough. The vocabulary is genuinely a mess, and half of it gets used wrongly on product pages.
Here’s the short version before we get into it: almost every name you’ll see describes either the height, the thickness, or where the shoe attaches to your foot. Once you can separate those three things, the wall of boxes turns into maybe six decisions.
Most people searching for types of women’s shoe heels are really looking for one answer: which shape will let me walk without wrecking my feet. So this is organised around that question rather than around a glossary.
Sort by height first, name second
Heel names are unreliable. Heights aren’t. If you learn four numbers, you can ignore most of the labels. The useful types of women’s shoe heels sort themselves out the moment you stop reading names and start reading millimetres.
Under 25mm is a low heel. Barely changes how you walk, works for long days, and is what most people should be wearing to the office.
25 to 50mm is where kitten heels and low block heels sit. This is the range that gets called “comfortable heels” in marketing, and for once the marketing is roughly true. You can walk a kilometre in a 40mm block heel without thinking about it.
50 to 80mm is the dressy middle. 70mm is the number that keeps coming up in fitting guides because it’s high enough to change your posture and low enough that your foot still works. Most of the classic shapes live here.
Above 90mm is statement territory. Your weight moves onto the ball of your foot, your calf stays contracted, and the shoe stops being something you walk in and becomes something you arrive in.
Ignore the word “mid” entirely. It means something different in every catalogue, usually somewhere between 50 and 70mm, and it tells you nothing you can use.
One number worth measuring yourself, because almost no brand lists it: the actual height at the back of the heel, from floor to where your heel sits. A shoe advertised as 90mm often measures 82mm in the smaller sizes, because manufacturers scale the heel along with the shoe. That’s why the same style can feel easy in a 36 and vicious in a 41.
Stiletto, kitten, block: the thickness question
These three words are about how much heel touches the ground, and that matters more than how tall the shoe is.
A stiletto is a thin heel, roughly 5 to 10mm across at the tip. It puts all your weight through a patch of floor smaller than a thumbnail. On carpet it’s fine. On cobbles, gravel, or the gaps between paving slabs, it’s a walking hazard. Wet grass is worse: the heel sinks and you leave a trail of holes.
Kitten heels are short and slender, usually 40 to 50mm, set slightly forward under the arch rather than right at the back edge. The name comes from the shape rather than any feline connection, and the design has been in and out of fashion at least four times since the 1950s. The history of the high heel is mostly a history of these cycles.
Blocks are solid shapes with real surface area, often 20 to 40mm across. That’s the most stable option and the least elegant, and anyone who tells you otherwise has never tried to cross a gravel car park at a wedding.
There’s a middle option that gets overlooked: the Cuban or Louis heel, which tapers from a wide base to a narrower waist and then widens slightly at the bottom. You get stability at the point of contact and a slimmer profile from the side. If you want the look of a thin heel without the sinking, this is the shape to hunt for.
Check the heel tip while you’re at it. A plastic tip wears down in about 40 wears and then starts grinding on tile. A rubber or TPU tip lasts twice as long and is quieter. Replacements cost about £10 at a cobbler and are worth doing before the plastic wears into the heel itself, which is a £35 repair.
Pumps, slingbacks and mules are shapes, not heights
This is where most confusion comes from. These words describe how the shoe stays on your foot, and each one fits a different kind of day.
A pump is a closed shoe with no fastening. It stays on through the fit of the topline alone. This is the hardest shoe to fit properly, because nothing adjusts. If a pump is even 3mm loose at the heel, it will flap.
Slingbacks use a strap around the back of the heel instead of a full counter. That solves the flapping problem and creates a new one: the strap has to sit at the right height or it slides off every fourth step. Slingbacks are also unforgiving about heel width, so try them on late in the day.
The mule is backless with no strap at all. It’s the easiest to put on and the hardest to walk in, because your foot has to grip with every step. Fine for a dinner where you sit for two hours. Bad for anything involving stairs.
Mary Janes have a strap across the instep. They hold the shoe on better than anything else on this list and make the shoe look younger, which is either the point or a dealbreaker depending on what you want.
An ankle strap works the same way but sits higher. Great for holding a heavy shoe on. Less great visually if you’re wearing cropped trousers, because the strap cuts the line of your leg at the narrowest point.
If you have narrow heels and a wide forefoot, which is more common than the shoe industry admits, the slingback is usually your best fit and the pump is usually your worst. Start there rather than working through the wall in order.
The heel that ruins your day is usually the wrong shape for your arch
Two women can wear the same 80mm shoe and have completely different experiences, and it isn’t about tolerance. It’s about where their arch sits relative to the shoe’s shank. This is the part that separates the types of women’s shoe heels that work for you from the ones that only look like they will.
A high heel works by putting your foot at an angle. The shank, which is the stiff part under the arch, is supposed to support that angle. If your arch is high and the shank is flat, your foot collapses into the front of the shoe and your toes take the load. If your arch is low and the shank is curved hard, the shoe presses up into the middle of your foot and you get a bruise by the end of the evening.
You can check this in the shop without any expertise. Put the shoe on a flat surface and press down on the arch area from underneath. There should be a slight curve, and it should feel firm rather than springy. Then put it on and stand up. If you feel pressure in the middle of your foot rather than at the ball, the shank is too curved for you.
This is also why expensive shoes sometimes feel worse than cheap ones. A strongly shaped last fits a strongly shaped foot. It’s not a better shoe, just a more specific one.
The test that catches most problems: stand up and try to lift your heels off the floor while keeping your toes down. If the shoe’s heel lifts away from your actual heel, the fit is wrong and no insole will fix it.
Wedges and platforms cheat the height
A wedge is a heel that continues as a solid sole under the arch. A platform raises the front of the shoe too. Both let you stand taller without putting your foot at the same angle, which is why a 100mm wedge feels like a 60mm stiletto.
That’s genuinely useful if you want height and can’t manage the pitch. It’s less useful than it sounds for walking, because a wedge or platform is heavier and stiffer, and stiff shoes make your foot work harder over distance. A 100mm wedge with a 30mm platform weighs roughly 380g per shoe in a size 39. A slingback at the same height weighs about 240g. You feel that difference at about the two-kilometre mark.
Platforms also change your balance point. The extra height at the front means you rock forward less, which sounds good until you step off a kerb and misjudge the drop. That’s the classic platform injury and it happens in the first week, not the tenth.
Where they win: outdoor events on grass, long ceremonies where you’re standing rather than walking, and any situation where the ground is uneven. For that, a wedge beats every thin heel ever made. The block heel sandals built for grass and gravel follow the same principle with more ventilation.
If you want to understand how the sole under your toes changes the whole shoe, the piece on platform heels and what the front sole does goes deeper into the geometry.
How to test a heel in ninety seconds
You don’t need a specialist. You need a hard floor and a bit of nerve about walking around the shop.
- Put both shoes on, not one. Half the fit problems only show up when you’re balanced.
- Walk 20 steps on the hard floor, not the carpet. Listen for a slap at the heel. A slap means the shoe is loose and will get looser.
- Stand still and shift your weight onto one foot. If you can feel the floor through the ball of your foot, there’s not enough underfoot cushioning for a long day.
- Press the back of the shoe with your thumb. It should hold its shape. Soft heel counters collapse within a month.
- Look at the seam where the upper meets the sole. Gaps or visible glue mean the shoe will separate at that point, usually within a season.
Ninety seconds, five checks, and you’ll reject about half of what you try on. That’s the correct outcome.
The one thing I’d add: try them on at 5pm if you can. Feet swell by up to 5% over a day, and a shoe that fits at 10am can be unwearable by evening. Every pair I’ve regretted buying, I bought in the morning.
What to buy first, if you’re starting from nothing
Buy a 60 to 70mm block heel in a neutral colour before you buy anything else. It covers offices, weddings, dinners, and the days when you just need to look sorted. Then add a slingback at the same height, because the strap makes it wearable on days when a pump won’t stay on. Both live in the main women’s shoe range if you want to compare heights side by side.
Only after those two should you look at a stiletto, and only for events where you’ll be sitting or standing rather than walking. The French satin black pair with a slim heel is the sort of thing that earns its place for exactly that: two hours, indoors, seated.
If you’re buying for a wedding where you’re standing for most of it, ignore everything above and get a block heel with a padded insole. The bridal pair with soft soles and a thin heel is the compromise most people end up making, and it works better than the pure stiletto they wanted.
And if pointed toes have always hurt, the problem might be the toe rather than the heel. A pointed toe with a properly cut vamp behaves nothing like the one that wrecked your feet in 2019.
Trend coverage doesn’t change the shortlist much either. Footwear industry reporting cycles through the same five silhouettes every few years; what actually changes is the toe shape and how thick the sole is. The categories stay put.
One last thing about the vocabulary. Product pages will keep inventing new names, and half of them will be wrong. Height in millimetres, heel width in millimetres, and whether there’s a strap. Those three facts tell you everything the name is trying to hide, and they’ll get you through any shoe shop faster than the labels ever will.
If the listing doesn’t give you all three, that’s your answer about the brand, not about the shoe.
