How do scissors “know” what hand you’re holding them in?

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I’m left-handed and growing up, in school, there were never enough left handed scissors between myself and the maybe two other lefties in my class so I would often need to use right-handed scissors. But they would either not cut paper at all or kind of tear the paper, forcing me to switch to my right hand to get the scissors to cut smoothly.

Just yesterday I needed to trim a label and no matter how I angled the scissors, they would not cut the paper but they immediately did once I switched to my right hand. Thus, how do scissors “know” which hand you’re holding them in?

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78 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

My shining moment as a left handed person was in the army. Turns out bandwagen 206’s were designed for left handed ppl 🙂

Anonymous 0 Comments

My shining moment as a left handed person was in the army. Turns out bandwagen 206’s were designed for left handed ppl 🙂

Anonymous 0 Comments

My shining moment as a left handed person was in the army. Turns out bandwagen 206’s were designed for left handed ppl 🙂

Anonymous 0 Comments

I think back on the days in kindergarten where we were using those cheap scissors to cut things out of paper. I always failed badly, being a lefty. My understanding was that we’re pushing the blades apart with right-handed scissors, while left-handed scissors are crossed so we push the blades together. There are scissors which claim to be left-handed, but all they’ve done is make them comfortable ergonomically, while not switching the blades. The difference is obvious and dramatic once you get proper scissors.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I think back on the days in kindergarten where we were using those cheap scissors to cut things out of paper. I always failed badly, being a lefty. My understanding was that we’re pushing the blades apart with right-handed scissors, while left-handed scissors are crossed so we push the blades together. There are scissors which claim to be left-handed, but all they’ve done is make them comfortable ergonomically, while not switching the blades. The difference is obvious and dramatic once you get proper scissors.

Anonymous 0 Comments

You are pressing the blades apart instead of pressing them towards each other. Scissors do not care which hand you use.

Anonymous 0 Comments

You are pressing the blades apart instead of pressing them towards each other. Scissors do not care which hand you use.

Anonymous 0 Comments

You are pressing the blades apart instead of pressing them towards each other. Scissors do not care which hand you use.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I think back on the days in kindergarten where we were using those cheap scissors to cut things out of paper. I always failed badly, being a lefty. My understanding was that we’re pushing the blades apart with right-handed scissors, while left-handed scissors are crossed so we push the blades together. There are scissors which claim to be left-handed, but all they’ve done is make them comfortable ergonomically, while not switching the blades. The difference is obvious and dramatic once you get proper scissors.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Your hands are mirror images of each other but they are not superimposable.

A ball pretty much is symmetric in all ways; you can rotate it freely or mirror it and it looks the same. A cube has a bunch of ways it can be symmetric, though you can only rotate it by certain angles for it to look the same. If you start painting faces (or otherwise making a part not identical) then you start getting limited in ways you can rotate or mirror it. Paint one side and you can rotate it on an axis through that face. Paint two different colors next to each other and you can still mirror it. Paint three adjacent ones with different colors and mirroring or rotating start resulting in different things, and there is no way to rotate and mirror to get an equivalent. Looking from the corner it would be the colors clockwise or counterclockwise.

For your hands, you can think of gloves. Ambidextrous are mirrored front to back so it doesn’t matter if your palm or the back of your hand. But other gloves match right and left; they have handedness. If you grip a rod with your thumb going one way, your fingers curl differently with respect that rod.

Right and left-handed scissors are mirror images of each other, and the relative orientation of the blades is different, kind of twisted in opposite directions to match the natural twisting force when using them.

This comes up pretty soon in organic chemistry, because carbon can make four bonds, and mirror-image compounds aren’t always interchangeable. For example, certain drugs only work for one ‘handedness’ of a molecule.