I'm female and do the same thing you do.

I'm sure this product works just as well for anyone who does like having long nails, whatever their reasons and regardless of sex, but it sounds like you and I simply aren't the target customer.

True it isn't necessarily about gender (of course not every woman wears them) though I haven't seen anyone who identifies as male wear them (though I suspect it might happen in the Gothic community). Hence the way I stated the question. Sorry I didn't mean to offend.

I asked my female identifying friends and most of them said that they don't like to wear them but they think they look good so they do it anyway :) And one said she loves them because she can sharpen them so she can scratch people (she's a dominatrix :). So yeah, reasons can vary.

This has nothing to do with fashion or 2cm long nails, but I'm a man and I sometimes like having my thumbnail around 2mm. It's like having a butter knife on the end of your thumb. You can strip wire, break through thinner plastic packaging, remove splinters without tweezers, and more.

In the 80s one long nail was a sign of someone who often would need a small spoon at hand.

It's common for lower-class Chinese men to have one long nail. I tend to assume the reason isn't drugs, but I don't know what it is.

I was annoyed once when I stumbled upon an advice column named "Ask a Chinese Girl", and someone had written in asking what that one long nail was about, and the official answer was "What? That sounds dirty, it's definitely not something Chinese people would do."

You can easily observe that they do do it by walking around outside. So weak support, I guess, for the drugs theory, but I still tend to suspect it's a cultural thing.

Anyone know?

I had thought it was a historically recurring status symbol, showing that the owner of the hands wasn't required to use them for manual labor.

Surely it's to show the user does not lift a single finger for themselves. Not just labour, but all useful action is shown to be eschewed by someone with lengthy pieces of plastic glued to each fingernail.

These are people who definitely are required to do manual labor.

This is my new favorite quintessential HN comment.

People have different priorities. From the article:

> If it’s so inconvenient, why not just have short nails? Well, I’m not out here wearing long nails for fun. Being a reviewer often means acting as a part-time hand model for whatever gadget I’m testing. The Internet Nail Police has repeatedly shown up in my comments over the years if my polish is chipped or, god forbid, there’s a smudge of dirt under my natural nail.

I guess that you could ask a woman, maybe one with long nails.

My girlfriend has long, vampy, very pointy, totally annoying nails by her own admission, and loves them.

The article covers this.