How To Treat And Prevent Peeling Nails

Before nails started to serve a mainly cosmetic purpose, in the days of prehistoric times, human nails were used for defending, digging, protecting the fingertips, and enhancing the ability to grasp and pick up objects. Keratin, the protein found abundantly in the hair, is the same thing nails are made of. While the layers of the nails are supposed to normally stay intact, some individuals may experience peeling with the tough nail layers. Peeling nails causes them to weaken, look thin, and eventually split and break. Onychoschizia is the medical term used to characterize splitting or peeling fingernails. External nail trauma can cause this to happen or it could be the result of a systemic condition indicative of a pathologic process happening in the body. A fingernail takes six months on average to grow its entire length, so it is possible nail abnormalities are caused by trauma that happened several months earlier.