If you're planning a fairy tale wedding, you've probably already got your ballroom picked out, complete with a skirt high enough to show off the perfect finishing touch: beautiful Cinderella-style glass slippers.

The good news is that glass slippers are easily available just about everywhere. You can find dozens of retailers with a quick Internet search. The bad news is that none of these glass slippers are actually wearable. They are collectors' items or award toppers, and are definitely not recommended for your wedding or your qualifying run for the Boston Marathon.

And, frustrating though the shattered dream of real glass slippers is, it's just the shoemakers of the world being responsible. Trust us: You don't really want them. Real glass slippers would shatter the moment you stood up in them. You don't want to spend your honeymoon with your groom tweezing shards out of your arches. Glass slippers sturdy enough to support a woman's weight - yes, even a delicate flower like yourself - would be far too heavy to walk in. You'd get tired just from lifting your feet up, and you wouldn't so much float down the aisle as clomp.

So unless you have a very obliging fairy godmother, take a deep breath and let go of the idea of glass wedding slippers made of glass. Good for you.

Fortunately, the magic of plastic can make your fairy tale wedding dreams come true. You can get transparent shoes - even the soles and heels - for the perfect look. Lucite shoes look particularly shiny and beautiful, so keep an eye out.

The Very Large Animation Studio that made a Cinderella movie offers both close-toed and open-toed clear plastic slippers for sale in adult sizes, but there are plenty of other retailers out there that offer a wider variety of styles. You can get "glass" flats, sandals, and heels, and can vary your look with a few well-placed Swarovsky crystals. If you're not quite like the other princesses, you can even find clear plastic platform heels. Just tell everyone you borrowed them from your Naughty Stepsister.

Finally, if you want to go old-school Cinderella, you can ditch the glass slippers entirely. The glass slippers are a detail added by Charles Perrault, who wrote the version of the Cinderella story most people are familiar with. But the tale is a very old one, and folklorists have traced it back to ancient China. If you go by the original version, you can walk down the aisle in simple, modest slippers made of pure gold.

They should be really easy to find.