The Long, Slightly Strange History Behind Fingernail Clipping

(via Atlas Obscura) No matter who you are,  your fingernails need to be trimmed.  Every couple of weeks you have to go through this process where small pieces of your keratin fly everywhere because you’re shoving them in a nail clipper. But the modern nail clipper is a fairly recent phenomenon… meaning that for most of human history, clipping one’s nails was a little harder than digging your rusty clipper out of the medicine cabinet.