when you clip your nail to low, there is a lot of pain, but fingernails growing/breaking doesn’t hurt??
In: Biology
The nails *themselves* don’t have nerves to feel pain: the pain you feel from a nail clipped too short is from the exposed nailbed. The nail is supposed to cover the nailbed; it’s not skin that’s meant to be exposed and has a lot of nerve endings. After some time exposed, the top layer of the nailbed will dry out and get harder, making it less sensitive until the nail can grow over it again.
We have a lot of nerve endings in our nailbeds because one purpose of our nails is to collect information via pressure.
Our fingertips are very sensitive in general to collect information, and the pressure info we receive from our fingernails is just one more piece. The nails themselves don’t have nerves, but because they are stiff they can transmit the pressure to the nerves in the skin they are attached to and to the base of the nail.
If you tear a nail deeper than just the tip of the nailbed, you can see some bleeding, because that part of the nail is still attached to the skin of the nailbed.
The “nail plate” (the top part that we call nails) are mostly made out of keratin, the same stuff hair is made from. It is actually a bit like how trimming your hair doesn’t hurt, but grabbing a few pieces of hair and yanking them out does — the pain is from the nerves where they are attached.
We don’t feel pain when our nails grow for the same way we don’t feel pain when our hair grows. The process is slow, natural, and constant.
It’s the sensitive tissue and nerves under that cause the discomfort. They are used to being protected by a nail.
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