Unlike, say, shaving or moisturizing, clipping your nails can feel more like a chore than a rewarding routine. Most of us tend to tackle the task with whatever nail clippers we grabbed in the checkout line of the drugstore. This is a mistake! It’s totally possible to enjoy cutting your nails, but you first need to first get a good clipper. Or several clippers: everyone have a dedicated clipper for fingers, and a separate one for toes. (Ideally, the toenail clippers will have a straight-across blade, in order to avoid all-too-common ingrown toenails—cutting your toenails with small, curved fingernail clippers makes it all but impossible to get the right nail shape. )
You also need devices that are durable and made out of hard, sharp material like carbon or stainless steel. They’ve got to pack the punch when you clip down through the hard nail. There isn’t a ton of room for innovation in fingernail and toenail clippers, but some devices do have small upgrades, like gripped handles or a nail-catching case. We spotlight some of those here, in our roundup of the best nail clippers for men, from fingernails to toenails, and a bonus for cuticles, too (for preventing hangnails). We snipped our way through dozens of devices and ten times as many nails to bring you this list.
Let’s start with our favorite of them all.
Best Fingernail and Toenail Clippers for Men
Our top pick:
Tweezerman has cornered the grooming-tools market (not just tweezers), and their stainless steel nail clippers are top of this list for being both excellent and relatively inexpensive. The pair includes a curved edge for fingernails, and a larger straight-edge for toes. There are more-innovative designs out there, but these are the best of the best at the baseline task of cutting your nails and never rusting.
Other Fingernail Clippers We Love
The Coolest Clipper
The Klhip like a tiny Transformer in its teeny tiny leather pouch. It has a built in cavity to catch the nail clippings, a pop-out lever to make cutting easy, a magnet that holds the lever in place when it’s all tucked away, a textured thumb grip, and the entire thing is made from high-grade 440C Japanese chromium steel.
The Best Clippers for Thick Nails
If you need some extra width for thick fingernails and thumbnails, then pick SZQHT’s stainless steel snipper. It opens much wider than a run-of-the-mill drugstore clipper, and comes with a separate nail file to help smooth over the cut.
The Best Pocketknife Nail Clipper
This keychain clipper from Victorinox Swiss Army follows you everywhere, and can do everything shy of changing your tires. It’s part pocketknife, part nail file, part cuticle pusher, part scissor, and of course, part nail clipper.
The Best Travel-Ready Nail Clipper
Ok, sure: all nail clippers are basically travel-friendly. But these are quite a bit more compact than usual, and they fold up to keep the blades closed together in transit. One more thing you don’t have to pack: a built-in file and cuticle pusher pops up and out of the shell.
The Best Toenail Clipper
While these Solingen-steel toenail clippers are comically large, these medical-grade shears are well-suited for slicing through even the gnarliest toenails.
The Best Cuticle Clipper
Every time you cut your nails, you should also be tending to your cuticles. While many clippers come with a built-in cuticle pusher, they still strand you without a dedicated, angled clip for the cuticle itself. That’s why this standalone cuticle snipper is a must-have device, thanks to its smaller, angled mouth. It’s so much easier than using tiny scissors.
