The only thing we understand about our fingernails is manicure, a broken fingernail or a stubbed toe, most of us tend to take our nails for granted. E pass like dat o!
Fingernails grow an average of 3.5 millimeters per month. That’s just over a tenth of an inch and nails on your dominant hand tend to grow faster.
Nails are made out of the same stuff as hair. Both nails and hair are made up of keratin, just put together in a different way, that means the same foods that are good for your hair are good for your nails.
A varied diet rich in vitamins, antioxidant fruits and veggies, protein, and minerals is key for healthy nails too. Keratin is a protein, and healthy oils and fats are also needed to keep the nails moisturized and strong. Note Men’s nails grow faster than women’s nails. The possible exception is during pregnancy.
To those who bite their nails,’nail biting’ is called onychophagia. It’s also the most common “nervous habit,” and most people stop on their own nail biting by age thirty. While nail biting is largely harmless, possible health risks include contributing to skin infections and aggravating nail bed conditions…how adult sef go dey chop fingernails…abeg be careful o!
Let your nails “breathe” between manicures. it’s best to reduce the amount of time your nails are polished to keep them at their healthiest. Believe it or not, that hard thing on the tip of your finger is living tissue, and oxygen does penetrate through the nail plate to the nail bed,research confirms! When you smother the nail and the nail bed beneath it, the nail has a harder time fighting off infections like the wart virus or a nail fungus. Also, nail polish is quite drying to the nail, so keeping them polished all the time (and re-doing the manicure repeatedly, with the drying chemicals used to remove polish) can eventually dry them out and make them less flexible and strong.
Nails are a window to the entire body and there is a huge amount that a well-trained dermatologist even in Nigeria that can tell about your overall health just by examining nails. From nail bed discoloration (blueish means lung disease), to capillaries in the cuticles (autoimmune disease), to yellow, white, or banded nails, sometimes very serious or even life-threatening disease can be diagnosed just by examining the tips of your fingers,research proved to us. So if you see something wrong or unusual, like a dark brown patch on your cuticle that also has an accompanying brown streak up across the whole nail plate (melanoma), see a dermatologist for help.
The summary be say our fingernails mata and make we keep them clean,make we check dem and be careful wetin we dey apply or paint on them…no be so?
