A woman who formerly held a Guinness World Record for the length of her fingernails says it broke her heart last February when they broke off in a car crash. However, 68-year-old Lee Redmond, of Salt Lake City, Utah, admits it has become much easier for her to get around since the accident snapped off her record-breaking assets.
Ms Redmond stopped cutting her nails in 1979. At the time of the crash, they had reached a combined length of more than 28 feet (8.65 metres). That's 30 years with not so much as a clip or a nibble-which has got to be something of a world record in itself.
Speaking publicly for the first time since the crash, she said: "Losing my fingernails has been the most dramatic thing that's happened in my life. It becomes your identity and I felt like I'd lost part of that. Yet I would always say when people would make comments about my fingernails, 'You know there's more to me than my fingernails.' "
She says that she now finds it easier to do all the things that she always used to do with them, but now the weight is different. "In fact my hands seem to fly with the weight gone."
Ms Redmond now has a mere 4.5 in (11.5cm) of nails and says she doesn't have it in her to start growing them back to their full former glory.
"It took me 30 years to grow them and to get them to that length and they became the world record, and I probably won't live for 30 more years."
Ms Redmond spoke about her fingernail trauma at the launch of the 2010 edition of Guinness World Records in her first public appearance since the accident.
She appears in the book alongside her counterpart fellow American Melvin Boothe, who holds the longest male fingernail title.
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