Do You Bite Your Nails?

gotta vote no, despite the fact that I once did, and am totally down with the whole nail biting scene. But I can't remember the last time I had a good munch on that sweet sweet keratin.

always, to a nasty extent.

i pick at my nails

If someone is biting or picking their nails, and I can hear it, I get scarily mad, like blindly furious. It is almost enough to send me into a homicidal rage, I can't explain this - it has always had this effect on me.

When I was younger, my uncle (who was only six years older than me so almost like a brother) took advantage of this to get me to comply with ridiculous requests like what tv programmes we were watching, if I got my own way and settled down smugly to watch cartoons he'd 'pick' all the way through them.

Oh yes, we were peculiar kids.

Ew. No. Did you guys see that hairball whichwas extracted from a woman's stomach? It was GIGANTIC! Apparently she had been biting/eating her own hair for YONKS.

I bite my nails. So does my father. Never really saw it as a huge problem so I never tried to stop, although my mother tried laying some of that earwax-looking 'stop nailbiting' shit on my nails when I was a kid, which was supposed to keep me from biting. I just washed it off.

My hands DO look gnarly, though

nathalie - can you provide a link to that story? I know someone who eats hair, and I've been warning him about just this sort of thing...

I'm kind of amazed how OK my nails look. Maybe I have mastered the art.

The question is - when you tap your fingertips on the table, do they 'click' or do they just 'thud?'

I'm something of a compulsive biter and have on occasion bitten them right down to the quick and seen them bleed. Which is a bit freaky.

And as for fingertips, mine thud.

Mine too. And I've bled many, manhy times.

Not to start a 'nailbiter's rights' thing or anything, but while we are on the subject, I for one am tired of being calssified as 'nervous' or of having an 'oral fixation. I bite my nails when I'm bored, not when I'm nervous, and also because it beats smoking cigarettes.

OMG I'M so bad with my nails ; (

it's a bit embarrassing you know when you're doing stuff with your hands in front of people... i'm also a shakes person, like my hands kind of quiver. so basically my hands can look kind of disturbing...

I'm glad there are some other nailbiting freaks here. I'm in the down to the quick, bleeding, thud-on-the-table category. I also tried the nasty tasting shit you can paint on your fingernails. It worked for a few hours, but then I learned to deal with the taste and keep going. I almost feel like posting a close-up shot.

eww i would never do that, the taste stuff. please don't post a close-up i can hardly stand to loo kat mine!

...How about I just post pictures of other people's nails, and we can say where we compare?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41125000/jpg/_41125888_nails_416_afp.jpg
http://www.drizzle.com/~mdavis/uploaded_images/fingers_1-713332.jpg
http://www.instructables.com/files/deriv/F74/L8EN/F44XYTIU/F74L8ENF44XYTIU.MEDIUM.jpg

Mine are closest to the first picture.

I bite my nails when I'm nervous, which usually only happens during hockey playoff season. They don't get all bloody, though. Just really, really short.

xpost - eww the last picture

I've long since given up hope of completely reforming. Instead, I aim to somehow make my bitten nails look more like the second picture. How do people get them like that?

i'm kind of like the first pic too. OKAY the 2nd pic you actually have to have some of the white stuff left. i usually don't.

That first picture could be my hand. Gross

i realise I am then try to hide it. It all goes back to when I was bullied for not biting my nails, which says alot about the mentality of 9 year olds growing up in rural new south wales.
but in the long run it saves time, none of this sitting down to fiddle around trying to cut them lark.

When I was a really little kid (seven) and heartbroken over world hunger, I came up with an idea wherein people could save their clipped fingernails. They could be ground into "fingernail flour" and used to make bread. Years later I realized the million, billion problems with this plan.

I do chew my nails, but only when I can't find my nail clippers.

I chewed mu toenails when I was a little girl, which I liked to show off to people. Reason 3789 I had a hard time making/keeping friends.

I would have totally been your friend if I saw that.

If there was a truth or dare game I'd be like, "Please, PLEASE dare me to try and chew my toenails!"

My hands are, most of the time, more like the second picture (except, like, brown) If, for whatever reason, I've been exceptionally bored and/or nervous they end up looking look like the first.

I'm also impressed that anyone is flexable enough to chew their own toenails - although chewing other peoples' might require a different form of flexability.

I bit my nails really badly until I got engaged and all of a sudden people were looking at my hands a lot more. The only way I can avoid biting them is if they're nicely manicured. Not fake nails or anything but short shaped and painted. Otherwise I bite away esp when drunk/stoned.

No.

Abbott - I used to bit my toenails too - a lot. It would drive my Mom crazy. Maybe that explains my lack of friends in childhood too.

um, bite - whoops.

I did this for several years, mostly because I was too lazy to look for a pair of nail clippers, but one day I found a pair and put them in my room and just stopped biting them. And a couple months later I started Ritalin with COMPLETELY made me stop, and kind of get disgusted when even thinking about doing it. About a month ago, I completely could NOT find nail clippers in my house, so I came very close to biting them off. They were so long that typing was hard. And people were noticing them and saying "why are your nails so long?" so I ended up using a pair of hair scissors to trim them! They now look a bit jagged, but they do not look like those GROSS GROSS NAILS ABOVE. Seriously when I see nails that are like that I feel ill I NEVER bit them down to the bone like that. Only when they would get long, I'd trim them with my face. If it IS an oral fixation thing, here's a tip: start smoking, or drinking juice boes (the straws are awesome oral fixation fixers. I could chew on a juicebox straw for hours)

Guys with too-long fingernails ZOMG creepy

i don't bite fingernails but i pick other stuff

I keep the nails shortish and filed but cannot stop biting the calloused skin around them. Esp in this dry weather my cuticles are an embarrassment.

My grandfather used to have to go the doctor to get his ingrown toenails cut off. He'd bring them home after and make Möbius strips out of them.

That definitely deserves a response. I just can't figure out what it should be!

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

eww

I was out of town when the results rolled in on this. On one hand, I'm glad I'm not alone. On the other hand, yeah, eww. We suck.

This New Year's resolution: start to think about approaches that will begin to reduce the amount of nail biting I do, on the whole.

This is the year when I quit. I slipped once yesterday on a single nail, but that's it. And I purchased some really bitter tasting nasty stuff that should arrive in the mail tomorrow. Apparently it works wonders but the downside is that you can't really have any fingerfood during the course of the treatment.

I can't wait to file my nails down to a good shape and then open some beer cans.

open some beer cans using the mysterious "fingernail" technique, I mean

I am perfectly at ease with my nail biting habit; I trim them nice and neatly with my teeth and don't ruin the cuticles or the skin around them so I don't see the problem.

i bit them so hard and severely that i would sometimes double over in pain