- Who would have thought it would be in the Midwest?
No two people are the same, but you’d be hard-pressed not to hit the nail on the head, when noticing her nails. “I was really shocked about it because to me, I didn’t think they were that long. But to other people they were long. But I didn’t think so at the time,” Armstrong says.
The 63-year-old grandma from Minneapolis set a new record for having the longest fingernails in the world, according to Guinness.
“I thought someone was playing a joke on me, I really did, so I hung up on them. Then two or three days later, I told my daughter about it, she said ‘Mom you should take their phone call’.
At total length, her fingernails are 42 feet and 10 inches long. When she has her grandchildren do her nails, once a year, it takes two dozen bottles of polish and 2 days for them to complete the beauty regimen.
“Some people say ‘ooh, they are so beautiful’. Then other people make faces. so I stay in the house most of the time,” she explained.
Armstrong says that she’s always had long nails as her mother did, but that ever since her 16-year-old daughter Latisha, who died from an asthma attack in her sleep 25 years ago, she can’t bear to cut them.
“Anytime I thought about cutting them off, it gave me chills like I’m going through that grief all over again. I didn’t want to go through that again, so I just kept them. It’s like keeping her close to me,” Armstrong says.
Because of the length of Armstrong’s fingernails, it can be difficult to do many daily tasks, like picking up clothes or money up from the floor. “If it’s something on the floor, if I ball it up or curl it up, I use my toes. If I have to pick up a phone or something, I’ll cross them and pick it up,” she says.
She really nailed it when it comes to keeping her daughter’s memory alive. “When I started growing them, it wasn’t to be in the Guinness Book Of World Records,” she said. “Now since I am, I tell people, you shouldn’t judge people because you don’t know what people have gone through.”