Please end the anxiety I’ve suffered over this question. What are those white spots that appear on my fingernails and where do they come from? –Katina Uribe, Flower Mound, Texas
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But don’t sweat, you probably don’t have any of them. Mere spots are extremely common and undoubtedly harmless. The folklore about them goes back for centuries; they’ve been called “gift spots,” “fortune spots,” and for some reason “sweethearts.” As with many other minor medical curiosities, little research has been done on punctate leukonychia in recent years. The white color has been variously attributed to trapped air and to defective keratinization, keratinization being the process by which nails are formed. Air bubbles and/or opaque, imperfectly keratinized granules within the nail cells refract light and the spots appear white.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Slug Signorino.
