Hair and nails: emotional and spiritual meaning

Hair protects the skin of the head. Nails are hard plates on the fingers and toes. Body hair warms and covers the skin. Sudden hair loss, a nail infection and a new, heavy growth of hair can have medical causes, including hormones, illness and medicines. They deserve a doctor, not only a story.

In the emotional reading, hair stands for strength, vitality, freedom and the image you have of yourself. Nails stand for a deep inner strength and for protection. Body hair stands for warmth, and for the wish to act.

What the hair represents

The source takes hair as strength and power, and remembers Samson. For a woman it is read as the power of attraction. For a man, as virility. It is tied to the dignity of the person, to the essence of power, and to self-image. It also represents your relation to the father, or to whoever stood in a father's place.

Hair grows near the crown, and the book calls it an antenna, linking the physical to the spiritual. Describing the state of your hair is, in this reading, describing how your spiritual side gets on with your rational, physical side. Hair is in constant growth, so it reminds you that you too are responsible for your own growth, and that you can change old ways of thinking that slow you down. The head is the place it grows from.

Men who grow their hair are often read here as artists in the soul, or as young men in reaction against an outside authority, wanting to take back a power whose seat the source places in the heart and its inner voice. That is the book's picture of a style. It is not a rule about any particular person.

Nails and body hair

The nails represent hard tissue and your deepest, most spiritual energy, the inner strength you can use to shape a life. They ask you to take time and not to force the current. They show how flexible you are able to be. They can be affected when your activity, your dexterity or your direction is changing and you struggle to face the change. The details of the day can become the whole of your attention.

A problem with the nails, an inflammation for example, means you are clinging and finding it hard to let go. You feel vulnerable. Nails that grow extremely thick are read as a wish to protect yourself the way a tortoise does, with a thick shell. You want to arm yourself against outside dangers, and you live in a prison. You want to put your claws out. The source asks a sharp question: are you really protecting yourself from other people, or from your own feelings of aggressiveness and self-destruction? Excessive care of the nails raises the question of the image you are defending.

Body hair protects and warms. A masculine pattern of hair in a woman is a hormonal matter, often met at adolescence or around the menopause, and it needs a medical look. The emotional reading tied to that disorder is that you are not taking your place enough. You want to pass into action and you cannot do it as you wish, so you become authoritarian. You protect your skin with extra hair, which is to say you protect yourself. Are you at ease in your skin as a woman? Which emotions, and which feeling side, are you setting aside because you want to control and rationalise everything?

Abundant hair, in a man or a woman, is read as an immense need for contact, and as primitive forces that can be positive when they are used consciously. When those forces run the life without measure, the source speaks of compulsive and aggressive behaviour, an excessive authority, and selfishness. A fall of hair after an illness or a shock is the feeling of being destitute and alone. The vital energy is losing speed. What do you have the impression of losing? Loss of the eyelashes touches the eyes and the gaze. You are afraid to look at what is happening to you. You live in anxiety because you know you cannot go back, as when a child leaves home and a point has been passed.

Caring for hair and nails from the inside

Hormones, fungal infection, iron deficiency, thyroid disease and skin disease are common medical reasons hair and nails change. The emotional perspective adds a question: what am I protecting, and what change am I unwilling to face?

• Ask about the father, or that place. Hair is the relation the source names there.
• Let one old idea grow out. Growth is the reminder the hair is given.
• Notice the shell. A thick nail is read as armour, and the question is who it is really against.
• Treat a new pattern of hair as medical first. The story comes after the hormones have been looked at.
• Name what you are afraid to look at. Eyelashes, in this reading, are the gaze you are turning away.
• See a dark streak in a nail. Meaning never replaces that appointment.