I was out with a friend yesterday and I noticed that his thumb nail had a big mark on it, like it was burned. When I asked him he told me that 20 years ago he burned part of his thumb and thumb nail ( the burn mark is a 0.5 cm thick vertical line on his nail). His doctor didn’t remove his nail at the time and that’s why the burn mark is still there ( or so he says ). This has made me curious tho, aren’t nails supposed to be constantly growing? If a part of the nail is broken/scratched/damaged the new part of the nail that will grow will be healthy in a few weeks. In a time period of 20 years his nail should have regrown hundreds of times. Are burn marks affecting the nail in a different way? And if so why?
Thanks!
In: Biology
Alright so I have a few decades of occasionally sticking my fingers into places they shouldn’t be and I have damaged my finger nails more times than I can count.
Damaging the nail doesn’t cause anything to happen that won’t grow out in time. Scarring the nail bed where they grow from can cause the nail to grow differently from that point on wards. So really it isn’t that your friend burned his nail it’s that he burnt the nail bed and left a scar that shows in how his nail grows out.
Nails are grown from a patch of tissue called the “nail matrix” which sits below and behind the cuticle. It produces new skin cells that push out the old cells that make up the nail. If the nail matrix is burned and scarred it can permanently affect the ability of new nail to be grown.
So burns *on* nails aren’t permanent because nails are like hair, they aren’t alive. But if you burn the nail matrix it is sort of like burning your hail follicles, it can cause permanent change.
I could be wrong here but
likely it was the nail bed that was scarred because as you said nails are constantly growing at varying rates and 20 year would be more than enough time to have had that section move and break off or be clipped off over time.
If I’m wrong I’m open to hearing another explanation
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