What are you wearing them with? I think ballet flats would go just fine with a cocktail dress.

I think they'd be fine for anything short of black tie.

Yeah, the flats will be fine. The Mary Janes and the slip-ons are indeed a little clunky, but the ballet flats are great. I would even wear the sequined ones, but then again I rarely go "anywhere."

Ballet flats are fine.

pretty ballet flats are go-to dressy for even the most formal affairs, just make sure to match their "dressiness" to the dress - i.e. if the dress is satiny, go with a similarly upscale fabric on your flats (grosgrain, satin, sparkle, you get my drift, right?)

also, for low back pain, see: yoga. Specifically the gentler types of yoga (this is assuming your specialist has cleared you for it). Don't go all power core or bikram, you need the sorts of yoga that gently extend and stretch your kinked back and neck muscles and align your hips. Hatha yoga may fit the bill.

I only say this because the mister and a friend both screwed up their lumbar regions in similar ways recently and have become healed, thriving and healthy on a steady diet of simple, easy to do morning yoga stretches.

There are a number of reasons this works, but the primary one is that as we have become desk- and chair-bound monkeys, the related forward head, closed shoulder / rounded back posture inherent to reading, typing, mousing/trackballing, blogging, knitting, needlepoint, TV watching, gardening, or really whatever-it-is that you're currently doing that forces you to continually look down / slouch forward is contributing to the delinquency of your posture. Yoga really, truly helps.

Yes on both of the first two pairs .. no on the Mary Janes. I'm with you on the lower back pain. My hub teases me about my "lumbago" but it can really interfere with daily life. I lie on a heating pad and take tons of "Vitamin A", or Advil as most people call it.

I agree with LFR and Kangaroo, the first or second would be great.
Also, I found this cute pair which have a tiny wedge but look even fancier because they are patent.

And yes on the yoga as well. I like Iyengar yoga because it's relatively gentle & they're all about using props to get you in the right position if you need it.

Thanks, all! The first pair it is; they are patent, which I think does up the dressiness a bit. (Now I'll just have to hope they fit... European shoe sizing and I do not always get along.)

And I would kill for a decent yoga class around here, especially Iyengar. I went to one class recently (some sort of gentle restorative thing) that managed to make my back worse, and I just tried a Rodney Yee yoga video specifically designed for back pain, and that tweaked it, too. I think the problem is that I've actually got an anti-slouch thing going on, where my low back curve is getting overly exaggerated rather than flattened, which is the usual problem, and so a lot of the one-size-fits-all yoga is concentrating on fixing a problem I don't have, and I don't trust the yoga teachers around here enough to get individualized help at this point.

Sigh. I miss San Francisco and my yoga teacher there.

I have been trying to incorporate some yoga stretching on my good days, though. I think the issue is that my hamstrings and midback are hideously tight, and my low back is relatively flexible, so that pretty much any time I do anything, my low back takes all the strain. So I'm trying to do what I can with hip-openers and hamstring stretches. And I did buy a couple yoga blocks and a strap, which are helping me. Plus, I feel all super-yogini having props at my house (despite the general lack of yoga lately).

Also, rmless2, I like the pair you linked, but I know from experience that my feet do not like Steve Madden shoes, no matter how cute. Which is a pity, because Steve Madden has a lot of cute shoes.

The ballet flats are perfect. I love the discreet shimmeriness and the squarish toe.

I also really like the slip-ons with white stitching, but not so much for dress-up.

Come back up here sometime and take a couple of classes! Though the drive up would probably negate the effect, back-wise. But still it'd be nice to see you.

occhi, if you're hyperextending your lower back, you may have tightness in the front hip flexors; specifically psoas and the iliac area. This will correspondingly cause tightness in the attachments high up in the hamstring as they're the balancing muscles. I see this a lot with young, high mileage bike racers who don't do enough ab work, because they get these crazy strong back muscles and correspondingly weak front muscles. The imbalance can cause the entire pelvis to tip/rotate forward and cause a condition called "cyclist's butt" (runners call it "swayback"), where there's a pronounced arch or hollow in the lower back. Not saying that this is what you have, but you may have the tightness that could predispose you to it.

The cure is opening exercises that target the front hip flexors, abs and hamstrings. Be careful! If that stuff gets tight it's easy to injure, and takes awhile to lengthen and balance out. Sounds like you've got a handle on it tho.

The cure is opening exercises that target the front hip flexors, abs and hamstrings. Be careful! If that stuff gets tight it's easy to injure, and takes awhile to lengthen and balance out.

Yeah, I did yoga 1-4x a week for about three years, and my hips were always the least flexible/open in the room, even at the end of that period (once yoga teachers knew me and my body it was fine, but it was kind of funny watching new teachers try to convince me that I could get into postures that I just physically was not capable of -- they'd start all "I'll help get that alignment right!" and end with "You stay where you are; let me get you some extra props to make that more comfortable for you"). I doubt I'll ever have superflexibility, but I certainly believe that not doing yoga regularly for the past two years has reduced what flexibility I did build, and I think it's starting to show.

Wow, I've been trying to figure out what it is that's causing the weird pelvic tilt that I've had for ages, where my spine looks curved more than normal, and thanks to lfr, I've finally figured out that it's called lordosis (swayback)! Now I finally have a proper term, thanks!