Over the past decade, I’ve worked with thousands of people to get their nails to grow longer, and I’ve learned the top three reasons why short nails are more likely to flake than long nails.
You will find all kinds of reasons on the Internet. Many of them are inaccurate and make you feel like something may be seriously wrong with your health.
The truth is, for most of us, the simple life hurts our nails the most.
When it comes to nails, there are three types of people.
- Those who don’t have length want them to grow longer.
- Hopefully, people with more than 3 mm in length will stay that way.
- People who don’t care.
If you’re reading this, it’s safe to say that you fall into one of the first two categories.
Step 1: Advice
The main reason can be summed up in two words – needle tip wear.
We use our hands all day long. No, really. One day.
Watch yourself go through your day. When do your hands do nothing?
Why are nail tips such a big problem for those with shorter nails?
People with short fingernails and people with long fingernails use their hands differently.
They can scratch, touch, poke, and so on with their fingertips.
My husband’s nails are short, and the skin on his fingertips is tricky to use.
The advantage of this is that he can precisely control when he touches different places on the phone’s screen. I could hear the skin of his fingertips clicking across the screen!
My nails vary in length from 3mm to 10mm, depending on how lazy I am in trimming them. The skin on my fingertips rarely touches anything.
As a result, on the rare occasions when I take a deep break, my fingertips are overly sensitive.
Touching things may be painful for a few days until the skin becomes harder.
Once the nail’s free edge has grown to about 3mm, we adjust our hands to the nail’s “in the way.”
1.Leave a mark
I’m physically unable to pick things up with my fingertips.
I use my finger pad. My fingerprints are everywhere!
As a result, my nails don’t touch anything.
This is where we come back to the problem of tip wear.
The free edge of short nails requires more abuse. They get more rubbing and beating.
booklike
While it’s not an exact analogy, think of your nail layer as the pages of a book.
When the pages are new, they are flat and well-placed together. Now, imagine if you kept fiddling with the edges. You repeatedly fan the page. Maybe you accidentally dropped it in the bathtub and rushed to the sauna to dry it off. Now, the pages curl and curl. You try to smooth the edges, but it makes them worse. You notice that some of the pages are starting to tear. But you have to keep reading this book. It slips out of your leg and hits the floor. You pick it up and try to smooth the page again, but doing so causes some pages to fall out of the binding.
Our nails can take a lot more abuse than this poor little book. But they are not indestructible.
Where we tickle, usually through the fabric, we scratch, dig, push, pry, poke, etc. Our hands and nails are often abused.
This abuse can cause the layers of skin on our tips to break apart and start peeling.
2. Water stains
Although our nails comprise a complex fibrous protein called keratin and have about 50 layers, they have one major weakness – moisture, like Superman’s weakness for kryptonite.
Look at the picture below. Water can pass through the pores in each nail cell.
Our nails can absorb a third of their weight in water in just a few minutes. It doesn’t sound like much.
Now, imagine what would happen if you absorbed a third of your body weight in water that quickly. You’re going to be conceited, soft, squishy. Our nails have the same effect.
It takes one to two hours for the water on the tip of the nail to evaporate.
But our nails need a small amount of moisture and body oil to stay flexible enough to bend when we bump into something.
Repeated exposure to water and evaporation can cause our nails to become stiff and brittle.
People with short nails often don’t do techniques that help reduce peeling and breakage.
3.Stress fracture
The official label for damage caused by repeated bending of the tip of the nail is a lateral crack. I call it a stress fracture because it’s easier to remember.
