I’m right-handed. When I hold the scissors with my right hand and chip away at the nails on my left hand, everything works fine.
However, my attempts at doing the exact opposite invariably fail. Either the scissors won’t cut at all, or the fingernails get bent outwards towards the top. Sometimes I’ll manage to split the nails into thin strands.
Apart from nail clippers, is there a proper method out there? Should I try the exact mirror image of how I use the scissors with my right hand? What’s the trick?
If you look at scissors and think about it, you’ll see your fingers are manipulating the parts of the blades on one side of a pivot while the cutting happens because the part of the blades on the other side of the pivot are forced to rub against each other as they close.
When you are using the ‘correct’ hand for a given pair of scissors, your thumb is pushing against the blade that is further from your hand – this causes the end of that blade beyond the pivot to swing slightly closer to your hand, insuring that the two blades rub together, and thus cut nicely.
Now put the scissors in the ‘wrong’ hand. Your thumb is pushing against the blade that is closer to the hand, so the blade end beyond the pivot is now moving closer to your hand, that is, away from the other blade. You’ve opened up a gap between the cutting blades, and items as thin as fingernails and paper will get bent and pulled between the blades instead of sheared.
Clear?
How to fix: When using the ‘wrong’ hand bend your thumb over against the loop and consciously PULL on the blade as you close the scissors, as if trying to get it closer to your hand. This moves the other end of the blade away from your hand and thus against the other blade, and the scissors will cut just fine.
Who uses scissors to clip fingernails? A nail clipper does a much neater job, can be used in either hand, and costs next to nothing. You can get them in supermarkets for about a buck.
I use nail clippers. If I can only find scissors I have to get someone else to do my right hand for me. And that can be very difficult in the middle of a busy street with no clothes on.
Incidentally does anyone else find that the finger next to the pinkie is the most sensitive to having its nail faffed around with? My mother claims I was just as sensitive about having that one cut when I was but a wee bairn. She proposes (with diagrams, slides and a powerpoint presentation) that it’s because that nail is the most curved.
Sorry to hijack, anyway, yes, nailclippers is yer answer.
But nail clippers make that disgusting, unmistakeable for anything else, sound – snick snick snick. UGH!
The sound of someone doing that anywhere in a cubicle farm drives me up the wall. I want to hunt them down and use the clippers to cut off their earlobes or something…
Whereas scissors are silent and thus discrete. Yes, they don’t do the job quite as cleanly, but the method is 1) cut nails to about 1/8" longer than desired lenght with scissors 2) finish off with emery board.
