Texas Woman With World’s Longest Nails Cuts Them Off

Well, it's done. The woman with the World's Longest Nails has cut them off.

Guinness World Records posted the video to YouTube on Tuesday as they documented the final length of Ayanna Williams' fingernails to record them as an official record. She has held the Guinness record for World's Longest Nails (female) since 2017.

Ayanna had been growing the nails since she was 27 or 28, now more than 20 years later she simply decided it was, "Time for them to go."

The question then was, who would do it? And how? One doesn't simply break out the nail clippers to snip off the world's longest fingernails. This is no typical manicure job, after all.

The who was Dr. Allison Readinger at Trinity Vista Dermatology in Fort Worth, Texas.

The how was a Dremel multitool. Yup, that nifty little rotary tool that almost every handyman or household has in their toolkit. This one was cordless and the task of cutting through ten world record holding fingernails nearly took the full charge.

Dr. Readinger has handled plenty of interesting situations over the years but remarked that this will always be one of the highlights of her career. You can watch the whole process in the Guinness World Record video. The actual cutting of the nails begins about four minutes in.

To make things official, measurements had to be taken. The total length came to 24 feet and 0.7 inches. That's 733.55 cm for our metric speaking friends.

When asked what it was like to have her nails cut back to a typical fashion length she said it was a lot of relief. Especially for the thumbs. As soon as Dr. Readinger handed Ayanna a new nail file she got busy touching up the ends.

Don't worry, these incredibly long fingernails didn't get tossed into the trash at the end of the day, they were carefully packaged and sent from Fort Worth to Florida, where they will soon be on display at the Ripley's Believe It Or Not! in Orlando.