Beauty & Health Tips – Don’t Cut Your Cuticle

Your cuticle is the little flap of skin that is between the start of your fingernail and your actual finger. Your cuticle, despite its name, is apparently not very cute, and many women routinely amputate them, or jam them back from whence they came.

Perhaps we find it frustrating that cuticles are not quite skin, but not quite fingernail either, and us first world folk demand that all of our body parts have clearly defined edges.

Here is a picture of some toes.

Estheticians also have a hate on for cuticles, and they will ravenously slash them off at every chance they get. However, as with a majority of your body parts, they exist for a reason. Specifically, they exist to prevent viruses and bacteria from crawling into the gap between you finger and fingernail.

Your body knows you’re going to be doing gross things with your fingers all day, and the cuticle is one way your body prevents that grossness from getting inside your body. By cutting or jamming the cuticle back into your finger, you can get infections and other ugly stuff. Since looking good was the initial goal, damaging your cuticle is kind of counterproductive, as you can end up with things like infections and Beau’s lines, which are uglier than they sound.