Hot Tips for Boots

These boots are made for walking, and that’s just what they’ll do, but did you know that--even after years of ownership--you can make your cowboy boots look flashier by adding silver- or gold-tone tips to the toes? Well, it’s true.

“My cowboy boots are from the ‘60s, they were a little beat-up looking, I didn’t wear them too much,” says Nance Billington of Los Angeles. “But then I got these tips as a present. I thought, ‘I can’t wear these! I’ll look like Billy Idol!’ But then I had them put on, my tips are in a rose-pattern, silver-plated--and the boots look great.”

“The straightest-looking people stop me,” Billington continues, “the kind of people you wouldn’t think would like these things, and they say, ‘I love those tips!’ ”

Donna Rude, owner of Boot Ranch in North Hollywood, sells the tips for anywhere from $19 to $35, and says the filigreed tips are really catching on. “They’re filigreed after the style of a Western belt buckle,” she says, “in leaf and flower patterns.”

The boot tips, which range in metals from gold and silver-plate to brass to sterling silver (for the more opulent boot wearer), appeal to many, but who likes what tip depends on the identity of the wearer, Rude says.

“The women like the gold tone,” Rude says. “The guys like the squared-off shapes. People in the rock music business like the squared-off shapes in silver.”

That may be, but one young woman found her sole-mate by looking down at her toes. “The guy I’m seeing now,” she says, “just happens to own the exact same filigreed-patterned tips as I do! When we met, he said, ‘I can’t believe you have those tips.’ ”