40 Fun Facts About Nails

Fingernails are made of which tough protein, also found in hair, hooves and rhino horns?

Keratin makes up the whole nail plate, which contains no nerves, so cutting it is painless. The same protein builds claws, feathers and the outer layer of skin.

Which country star made the typewriter beat of her hit 9 to 5 by clicking her acrylic nails?

Dolly Parton is listed in the song's credits for lead vocals and nails. She devised the clacking rhythm by running her acrylic fingernails back and forth against one another.

What do nails only appear to do after death, an illusion caused by the skin drying and shrinking?

Nails only seem to keep growing: the skin dehydrates and tightens, exposing more of each nail. The same shrinkage makes hair and stubble appear longer too.

Which nail look with white tips did Orly founder Jeff Pink create for Hollywood film actresses in the 1970s?

The French manicure was devised so screen actresses need not repaint their nails at every costume change. Pink only renamed it on a flight home from the Paris catwalks.

Which Hitchcock actress helped Vietnamese refugees train as manicurists, seeding a nail salon boom?

Tippi Hedren saw that women at a California refugee camp in 1975 admired her manicured nails, so she brought in her own nail technician to teach them. A beauty school then helped them find jobs.

Which sprinter won three 1988 Olympic golds with six-inch nails painted red, white, blue and gold?

Florence Griffith Joyner had styled hair and nails in her spare time while working at a bank. At the 1988 US trials her four-inch nails wore tiger stripes.

Nail polish giant OPI began as Odontorium Products, a small firm supplying which profession?

Dentists were OPI's first customers. George Schaeffer bought the small supply firm in 1981 and, with Suzi Weiss-Fischmann, turned it towards acrylics and lacquers for nails.

Former record holder Lee Redmond lost nails she had grown for 30 years in which kind of accident?

A car crash in Utah in 2009 broke the nails off when Redmond was thrown from the vehicle in a four-car pile-up. She said later that everyday tasks had become much easier without them.

In which country did nail polish begin 5,000 years ago, later mixed from beeswax and egg whites?

China's Zhou dynasty royal house preferred gold and silver nail colours around 600 BCE. Red and black later replaced the metallic shades as royal favourites.

Shridhar Chillal, who let five fingernails grow uncut from 1952 to 2018, comes from which country?

India's Shridhar Chillal reached a combined length of 909.6 centimetres, with a thumbnail of nearly two metres. A power tool cut the nails off in 2018 at a Ripley's museum in New York.

Which cosmetics giant was founded in 1932 with a single product, a new type of nail enamel?

Revlon takes the L in its name from chemist Charles Lachman, who founded it with the brothers Charles and Joseph Revson. They launched in the middle of the Great Depression.

Which brand, founded by Northam Warren in 1911, sold one of the first liquid nail polishes before 1920?

Cutex started with a remover for the excess skin at the base of the nail, then moved into nail tints and liquid polish. Its later polish remover, safe to use at home, helped liquid polish reach the mass market.

Nitrocellulose, the main ingredient of most nail polish, is also an explosive known by which name?

Guncotton was one of the compound's first major uses, as a replacement for gunpowder in firearms. In the 20th century the same material was adapted to automobile lacquer.

Which solvent is the main ingredient in many nail polish removers and is used to soak off gel nails?

Acetone is also made by the human body, which produces and disposes of small amounts through normal metabolism. It breaks down ordinary polish, cured gel and acrylic alike.

Pearl essence, which gives some nail polish its shimmering lustre, comes from which natural source?

Fish scales yield crystals of guanine, whose transparent layers bounce light back to give a pearly lustre. The same crystals add shimmer to eye shadow and coat imitation pearls.

Ancient Egyptians stained their nails reddish brown with which plant dye, still used for body art?

Henna is made from the dried, powdered leaves of the shrub Lawsonia inermis. Even mummified pharaohs have been found with their nails painted with it.

The word manicure combines two Latin words meaning care of which part of the body?

The hands give manicure its first half, from Latin manus, joined to cura for care. Pedicure was built the same way from pes, the Latin for foot.

Which thin layer of dead skin at the base of a nail is pushed back or clipped during a manicure?

The cuticle is non-living tissue, but the fold of living skin that produces it, the eponychium, should be left alone. Cutting that risks pain, bleeding and infection.

Human fingernails grow an average of about 3.5 millimetres over which length of time?

A month brings about 3.5 mm of fingernail but only around 1.6 mm of toenail. That is why a lost fingernail regrows in three to six months and a toenail can take a year or more.

Koilonychia, or spoon-shaped nails, can be a sign that the body is short of which mineral?

Iron shortage can show in the nails as a hollow dip, and koilonychia comes from the Greek koilos, meaning hollow. The condition is also linked to Plummer-Vinson syndrome.

The small white nail spots called leukonychia are most often caused by which of these?

Minor injury to the base of the nail is the most common cause. The popular idea that the spots mean a lack of calcium is not backed by research.

Mees' lines, white bands across the nails, are a classic clue to poisoning by which substance?

Arsenic leaves the white bands after an episode of poisoning, as can thallium. They carry the name of Dutch physician R. A. Mees, who described them in 1919, though an English doctor had reported them in 1901.

Clubbed nails, a sign of heart or lung disease, are also named after which ancient Greek physician?

Hippocrates' era already recognised clubbing as a sign of disease, hence the name Hippocratic fingers. Another nickname, watch-glass nails, describes their bulging shape.

Onychocryptosis, a painful problem that most often strikes the big toe, is better known as what?

An ingrown nail takes its medical name from Greek words for nail and hidden. Shoes are a main culprit, which is why toes suffer far more often than fingers.

Onychomycosis, which thickens and discolours nails in one adult in ten, is which kind of infection?

Fungal nail infection, also called tinea unguium, is more common in toenails than fingernails. The nail can turn white, yellow, black or green and become brittle.

What is the pale crescent at the base of a fingernail called, best seen on the thumb?

The lunula is the visible edge of the tissue that makes the nail, and its name is Latin for small moon. It looks white because of the way light reflects there.

Which hidden tissue under the skin at the base of a nail produces the cells that become the nail?

The matrix decides how wide and thick a nail will be, while the shape of the fingertip bone decides whether it grows flat, arched or hooked.

Which informal name for the tender skin under a nail tip appears in a phrase about being cut to it?

The quick is properly called the hyponychium. The word is an old term for living flesh, which is why cutting someone to it means wounding them deeply.

Emery, the gritty rock on a classic nail file, once came mainly from which Greek island?

Naxos used to be the main source of emery, a rock made largely of the hard mineral corundum. Emery boards are cheap enough to throw away, which makes them a sanitary alternative to metal files.

Gel nail polish does not air-dry and must be hardened under a lamp giving off which kind of light?

Ultraviolet light hardens the gel into a durable coat that can last two to three weeks. Dip powder nails need no lamp, setting with a liquid activator instead.

The adhesive for press-on nail tips is a cyanoacrylate, the same family as which household product?

Super glue and nail glue are both cyanoacrylates, sometimes simply called instant glues. Other members of the family are made for medical, veterinary and first aid use.

In Legally Blonde, which actress plays Paulette, the manicurist who befriends Elle Woods?

Jennifer Coolidge plays Paulette Bonafonté, whom Elle meets after learning of Warner's engagement. OPI later made a Legally Blonde 2 polish collection that appears in the sequel.

In decades of TV ads, Madge the manicurist soaked her clients' fingers in which dish-washing liquid?

Palmolive's campaign ran from 1966 to 1992 with actress Jan Miner as Madge, who worked at the Salon East Beauty Parlor. In Germany the character was known as Tilly.

The speed of fingernail growth is a common comparison for the pace of which geological process?

Plate movement at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge runs at 10 to 40 millimetres a year, about the pace of a fingernail. The faster Nazca plate travels at roughly the speed that hair grows.

Which chemical belongs to the 'toxic trio' that many nail polish brands have dropped from their formulas?

Formaldehyde makes up the trio with toluene and dibutyl phthalate. San Francisco passed an ordinance to publicly identify salons that use polishes free of all three.

Which beauty brand, founded by a former Hollywood dancer in 1946, first trademarked Hard As Nails?

Sally Hansen was a real person, born Sally Finney in 1908 to the owners of a small cosmetics company. Her firm's logo was modelled on her own signature.

Which small South American monkeys are unusual among primates in having claws rather than nails?

Marmosets' claws are a foraging adaptation to life in the trees. Almost all other primates carry flat nails on their fingers and toes.

Which actress stars as Florida nail salon owner Desna Simms in the TNT crime series Claws?

Niecy Nash's Desna launders money for a crime family through her salon, Nail Artisans, hoping to save enough to buy a better one. Claws ran on TNT from 2017 to 2022.

Essie Weingarten launched her nail polish brand in 1981 by unveiling twelve colours in which city?

Las Vegas was where Weingarten premiered her first twelve fashion shades. She sold the company to L'Oréal in 2010.

Runner's toe, also called tennis toe, is a pool of what trapped beneath a toenail?

Blood pooling under the nail presses on the nail bed, causing a throbbing pain that eases once the pressure is relieved. The trapped pool can look red, brown, blue or black.