Paper Cuts

Paper cuts – I hate them! They always occur unexpectedly, and they produce a lot of pain. I’ve always wondered – how can something so flexible, skinny, and seemingly harmless, be so dangerous and hurtful.

The primary reason why paper cuts are so painful lies in where they generally occur - fingers/fingertips. Our hands and fingers have many more nerve fibers per square millimeter than most of the rest of our body – this makes cuts in general which occur in hands and fingers more painful than in other parts of our body.

However, paper cuts seem to sore much more than other cuts; they can even be more painful than other cuts that occur on fingers. This is because the edges of paper are very dull and flexible compared to knives and sharp objects – this causes paper, when it cuts through your flesh, to do a lot more microscopic damage as it rips through your skin. You could imagine it as a very dull knife with which you are trying to cut a piece of steak with – you will have to saw the steak more harshly with a dull knife than with a sharp knife. When you finally cut a piece of meat with the dull knife, the cut you’ve made will be a lot more mutilated than a cut done with a sharp knife. When paper cuts through your flesh, a similar thing occurs, which can be greatly noticed at a microscopic view.

Also, the fact that paper cuts are very shallow affect the duration of the wound – this is due to the cut usually not creating, if any, much blood. This causes the wound itself to remain open since the platelets, which are found in the blood, are the ones that cause the wound to close by clotting on the opening. This leaves the nerve cells open to the air and various irritants, causing these wounds to remain open much longer than more significant cuts.

Hope you found it interesting learning about the reasons to why paper cuts are so painful J

Izzie