The World’s Longest Fingernails: Over 13 Metres in Total, Uncut for More Than 25 Years

World Records #2

The Takeaway

The record for the world’s longest fingernails belongs to Diana Armstrong of the United States. The ten nails on her two hands measure 1,306.58 centimetres in total — more than 13 metres.

Here is the story behind the record, in brief.

Diana’s nails were officially measured on March 13, 2022, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, and certified by Guinness World Records.

To get a feel for what 13 metres means, compare it with everyday things:

• Longer than a typical school bus
• Roughly four small cars lined up end to end
• More than seven tatami mats (traditional Japanese floor mats, about 1.82 metres on their long side)

These are not figures for a single nail. Even as a combined total across ten nails, the average works out to more than 1.3 metres per nail.

So why did she keep growing them?

Diana stopped cutting her nails in 1997. That year, her 16-year-old daughter, Latisha, died suddenly from an asthma attack.

Latisha had been the one who polished and cared for her mother’s nails. Wanting to keep that memory close, Diana decided she would never cut her nails again.

In other words, this record was never the goal. It is the result of more than 25 years of holding on to a memory — a world record that accumulated along the way.

You can see photographs and video of the nails themselves on the official Guinness World Records page:

https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/longest-fingernails-on-a-pair-of-hands-female-

Life with nails like these is harder than you might imagine.

According to Guinness World Records, painting a single nail takes about five hours, and one nail uses up more than a whole bottle of nail polish. Filing and maintaining them requires powered tools.

Even so, Diana says she has no intention of cutting them.

On the official Guinness World Records page, the holder is still Diana Armstrong. The record of more than 13 metres has yet to be broken.

For comparison, the longest nails ever recorded on a man belonged to Melvin Boothe of the United States, at 9.85 metres (certified in 2009). Diana’s 13 metres surpass even that.

Twenty-five years that began in grief became a length no one else can match.

That is the part of this record the numbers alone cannot tell you.

References

• Guinness World Records, “Longest fingernails on a pair of hands (female)”