Earlier this year, a man posted on Facebook that his mother-in-law had just laughed at him for not knowing what the tiny hole at the bottom of nail clippers is for. The post went viral. Thousands of people piled on to confess they’d never given much thought to this everyday object. Some said they assumed it was decorative. Others had theories. A few, including myself, boldly claimed they’d always known. (I said as much to my husband, who gave me the look he reserves for moments when I am technically correct but not as charming about it as I think I am.)
The kerfuffle sent me down a rabbit hole that eventually led to Jake Peters, the founder and CEO of EDJY, a company that has done something no one has done in about 145 years: fundamentally reimagined the nail clipper. Peters has traveled the world to buy and analyze nail clipper designs, owns hundreds of them, built a team that includes an engineer who designed suspension systems for cars and otherwise has become the closest thing to a nail clipper scientist that exists.
He knows what that little hole is for, and he knows that you’re probably not using it. It’s the sort of detail that doesn’t demand attention—kind of like a nail clipper itself. “You own nail clippers?” he asked me. “Yeah, and you don’t know where you bought them, the brand, what you paid for them or even where they are. You might be able to find them if I turned your house upside down and shook it. Six or eight of them would fall out.”
This is pretty accurate. I have six nail clippers, and I’m proud to say I know where all of them are. Thanks to my husband and children, there are almost certainly others in my house that I haven’t discovered yet—they’re like truffles, except less exciting.
Sound like your situation? Like my family, you need an introduction to that easy-to-overlook hole. Read on to find out the hidden meaning of this design feature and learn how it can help you keep track of this essential toiletry.
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Why do people think that little hole is there?
The theories in the comments of that viral Facebook post ran the full gamut from reasonable to spectacularly wrong, which is the internet’s greatest contribution to daily life.
The most popular guess was that the hole catches nail clippings. It’s a noble idea that falls apart the moment you consider how small the hole is and how aggressively clippings travel in every direction except toward it. Peters told me the typical nail clipper uses about 175 pounds of force to crush a nail, which is why your clippings end up in your spouse’s coffee across the room.
Other guesses included structural support, ventilation (absolutely not) and—my personal favorite—a bottle opener. (What is that, a bottle for ants?) Several people said it was purely decorative. A few guessed the correct answer and got into arguments with everyone else.
The real surprise wasn’t the wrong answers. It was that so many people had never once examined the tool they’ve used thousands of times. Peters says this is entirely on brand for the nail clipper. “Five million nail clippers are sold a day. Certainly more than 50 billion, if not 100 billion, nail clippers have been sold overall,” he says. “And yet [most just aren’t] well designed.”
When something is that ubiquitous and that mediocre, nobody bothers to look closely at it. It just exists, like elevator music or the mystery cord on your window blinds. I’ve written about the hole in your safety pin and why maple syrup bottles have those tiny handles, and the more I learn about everyday objects, the more fascinated I become.
So what is the hole in your nail clipper actually for?
It’s for attaching your clippers to a keychain, lanyard or toiletry bag so you stop losing them every six weeks. (I was right. Moving on.)
No secret function, no engineering wonder—just a small attachment point so you can thread a key ring through it and keep your clippers where you can actually find them. Some early clippers even came with a small chain already attached for exactly this purpose.
Peters confirmed that the feature traces all the way back to the original patent. “It’s not a hole, but they have a loop in the patent from 1881,” he says. “You’ll recognize the product. It’s 100% exactly the product at Target today. From 1881.”
It’s so elegantly useful, in fact, that when Peters set out to redesign nearly everything about the nail clipper, the hole was one of the few things he kept. EDJY cutters have an updated version on their protective cap for the same purpose.
The hole has also picked up a few bonus uses over the years. You can hang your clippers on a hook inside a bathroom cabinet so they’re never buried under 16 tubes of expired sunscreen. You can thread a ring through two clippers—one for fingernails, one for toenails—to keep them together as a set. (Your nail tech will notice if you mix them up.) And in many clipper designs, the hole doubles as the insertion point for the pivot pin that holds the lever and base together during manufacturing. So it’s not just practical for the user. It was functional during construction—the belly button of the nail clipper, if you will.
Has that hole always been there?
Yup, it’s been around more or less since the beginning, which for the modern nail clipper was the 1880s.
Before that, the standard method of nail trimming was a small pocket knife. You’d hold it perpendicular to your fingertip and peel the nail like an apple. Peters summarizes the design flaw: “There’s a reasonable probability that your fingers are bleeding.”
So in 1881, inventors Eugene Heim and Celestin Matz of Cincinnati filed U.S. Patent No. 244,891 for a lever-based “finger-nail trimmer” that gave users roughly 15-to-1 mechanical leverage—no bleeding required. And right there in that original patent, projecting from the lever’s free end: a loop.
The patent, notably, doesn’t call the cutting surfaces “blades.” It calls them “jaws.” Peters finds this telling: Traditional clippers crush the nail rather than cut it, which is why they send clippings flying and—as any nail tech will tell you—leave ragged edges that aren’t great for nail health. It’s also why Peters reinvented the classic tool with a single guillotine-style blade, making EDJY cutters the first meaningful redesign of the device in roughly 145 years.
The lever, he’ll be the first to say, was always brilliant. “The lever on a nail clipper is magical,” Peters says. “Everything below the lever was terrible.”
By the early 1900s, nail clippers had become mass-produced commodities: affordable, widely available and apparently so satisfying that superstitions began springing up around them. An 1889 Boston Globe article earnestly advised readers not to cut their nails on Fridays, Saturdays or Sundays, lest they play into the devil’s hands, invite disappointment or end up with bad luck all week. (Based on my current schedule, I am in for a rough few months.)
Is that little hole here to stay?
Almost certainly. Features that serve no purpose get cut—they cost material and manufacturing steps, and accounting will notice. The hole’s persistence across every price point, from the $2 drugstore pair to premium Japanese models to Peters’s own EDJY cutters, is proof that it still earns its keep. People hang clippers on hooks, attach them to key rings, keep fingernail and toenail pairs together, and clip them to toiletry bags so they survive the journey home from a hotel.
As for why so many people still don’t know what it’s for, Peters has a theory. “Every person under the age of 30 got their nail clippers by stealing them from their parents when they left home,” he says. “And the child does not think they’re a thief. Nor does the parent think they’ve been stolen from, but a crime has occurred.”
I laughed out loud at this because I absolutely took my parents’ nail clippers to college. I have no memory of buying my first pair as an adult. I do, however, have a very clear memory of buying my children their own nail clippers for Christmas a few years ago, specifically so they would stop taking mine. I wrapped them up and put them in their stockings with a cheerful bow, and they had the audacity to look slightly underwhelmed. The next generation will understand when they’re older. The cycle continues. The hole remains.
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Sources:
- Jake Peters, founder and CEO of EDJY; personal interview, March 19, 2026
- U.S. Patent No. 244,891: “Finger-nail trimmer”
- Newspapers.com: “Ruled by Superstition”
- Atlas Obscura: “The Long, Slightly Strange History Behind Fingernail Clipping”
- EDJY: “The Evolution of Nail Clippers”
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