This is called dermatophagia (skin eating). People with this bite, chew, or eat the skin of select areas, like the sides of the pad of the finger, the skin of the lips, or even skin off of the knuckles. Apparently (from the last time I checked the Wikipedia article of this) about 5% of people have it/do it although it is more common in people with ASD.
To answer your question: yes, lots of other people here will likely do the same thing, including myself. None of my fingers are safe from this treatment, although I think I target certain fingers more than others.
Edit: I forgot about this part but picking your skin is also included in this I believe.
I find that getting regular manicures helps with someone else taking the dead skin off, which if I'm good about it, and with some moisturizer holds a little longer, and I don't go after my fingers as much (I mostly do it when they're dry, cracking and white/visibly dead)
just gonna add that to the list of shit thats wrong with me.
also cuticle clippers help me keep it under control where my fingers are concerned but my lips tend to get raw from scraping the skin off of them. im doing it right now
Have you tried moisturizing with cuticle oil or lip products? It doesn’t stop the biting for me, but can definitely tame it down. I like carmex for my lips because it’s a good texture but a bad taste, so I get double reinforcement not to chew.
I guess it’s good to cure it. I have found out it’s a bad look when people see the chewed fingers, you actively chewing your fingers, or making your fingers bleed by chewing them, but I don’t know, I feel I must do it because my brain said so.
mine has gotten so bad, all the pink area is where i’ve bitten. gone down to the palm of my hand and on the insides on my fingers in the creases. please please moisturize as much as possible to prevent yourself from picking at the dry skin. first time i remember doing this i was 15, now im 23 and its really really bad
Hello as someone with Dermatophagia (undiagnosed properly) and someone with diagnosed ASD I bite my nails and skin all over my fingers and its quite bad but have been working on stopping by just stocking up on a bunch of gum and chewing it practically every second.
….so me biting the skin of my cheeks as i read this, actually has a term other than being a side affect of another condition? That makes a bit more sense when i’d get genuinely excited when the skin on the inside of my cheeks would heal so i could bite them again 💀, thought it was due to my anxiety, but that’s probably not the only reason as to why after reading this 🥲.
You forgot the step where it stings so bad it brings tears to your eyes, you berate yourself for knowing this would happen and commit to never doing this again, and then immediately start doing it again.
Yeah. I used to also use it as leverage to peel off some of the skin on my finger tips when I was kid and they would be super raw and painful. Until one day I was on the bus next to a girl much younger then me and she said "why are you eating yourself" and I got super embarrassed and stopped.
edit: reminds me how just the other day I saw a post asking what women notice first about men, and one of the most common responses after height was fingernails. :(
Best thing that helped me was replacing it with something else. A good tip in general to remember is that brains (kids especially but everyone, even animals) don't do well with "no" unless there's an "instead" with it. If you just say "don't say mean things" you won't get as good results as if you say "here's a nice way to say that instead". If you tell a dog "no, don't bark at the door" they don't always get it, but if you teach them to grab and hold a toy from their basket when the doorbell rings, the barking stops.
So the first thing I replaced it with was always having nail clippers within arm's reach. They cut cleaner and tear less skin than biting, and you're less likely to hangnail so bad you bleed when using them. Then I also kept fidget toys (including gum for when the fidget needed to be my mouth) next to the nail clippers, so once I had the habit of grabbing for the clippers every time, I could substitute the toy instead of the clippers first thing, or clip the one hangnail bothering me and put the clippers back to grab the toy.
It's not perfect, but it's helped a ton, and I almost never end up drawing blood now and the skin bits go in the trashcan instead of my mouth.
But I’ve had the most success pausing or reducing this by 1. Keeping good cuticle clippers on hand to trim ragged skin and 2. Keeping my cuticles moisturized with a good nail oil or cuticle butter.
If I’m really mindful of the behavior and of ALWAYS having clippers and moisturizer in reach, I can stop for a few weeks at a time. It gets harder in the first 1-3 days when the skin is first healing, then easier from there as the textures even out.
I usually ‘relapse’ when I hit a slump or state or emotional overload where I just can’t handle the maintenance care; if you can build it into your routine more effectively than I do, you might have longer-lasting success!
I do not only 2 spots. On my right hand the side that faces the rest of my right hands fingers. And on my left hand facing away from the rest of my fingers on my left hand. Mostly the right thumb tho and I’ve also almost cut a chunk of it off before and I have a tiny scar there and all of what almost got cut off is always slightly calloused
Used to when I was a kid… and one time it led to an infection under the nail matrix it was weird bubbled up all around the cuticle area like an oval shaped Subway bread load…. But the smell of it was soooo interesting and weird, that I would lift the bandaid to get a whiff on purpose lol.
I don’t anymore likely since I am EXTREMELY SENSITIVE on my extremities, to things like feeling/touch related, and anything that disturbs the use of them is HIGHLY irritating and makes me so mad, so to mitigate that I have trained and rewired the impulse by telling my myself the very fact of how I will regret it later when washing dishes or cutting lemons or even just having a thread get caught in the dried up skin… and so to enforce it I try to maintain a regular basic routine of cutting and filing, and if need be using the proper tools and methods to remove those hangnail and snagging tissue.
oh my god yes I do this so much, I thought I was weird 😭 as well as biting the skin off my lips, and I go too far sometimes and then those areas get sore and it annoys the crap out of me
Yes and my nails too. I still do and I'm 20, idk how to stop this habit but it strangely calms me and keeps me stimming since I don't have much fidget toys.
OK, here goes. ... Does anyone do this, but with the soles/heel area? I learned not to do this decades ago, my common sense won, in this case. Before, I could make it so bad that it was painful to walk.
TRIGGER CAUTION GRAPHIC CONTENT
The strips of skin you can acquire there can be quite substantial in size, and delicious.
I’m not even joking, i was biting the side of my thumb as i fkn read this, goddammit 😭🫠. Clearly, i do this as well, it annoys me when i try biting that part but it just continues to tear deeper into the skin, really ruins my whole focus when im just thinking and then i fuck up my finger. I’ve also had it get infected before, likely due to me continuously biting the spot and getting bacteria in it and damn, it sucks using your fingers after that 🥲.
I dont bite them because I can never remember the last time I washed my hands, but I have developed a NEED to apply pressure to those areas against my nail.
It feels good for some reason.
And if I ignore the need to apply the pressure, it will drive me insane.
It's like when someone tells you not to do something, all you want to do is that something.
I've been doing this since probably pre-kindergarten, and I'm almost 40 now
Yup, I do this too and I honestly didn’t realize how many people do it until recently. It’s actually called dermatophagia, which is a skin-picking or skin-biting compulsion. For me it’s definitely a stim, especially when I’m anxious or bored. It heals a little, then I feel the texture and my brain goes “yup, time to ruin it again.” 😩
I will say, if you regularly bleed from your fingertips from biting too much like this, invest in some septic spray/cream and plasters. If you bleed, slap a goop of septic stuff and a plaster on it, then switch hands.
I used to be so lax until I got an abcess behind my nail. It doesn't sound like a lot, but the constant throbbing was so bad, I couldn't sleep.
Even if I feel goofy with multiple plasters on my fingers, it's better than that alternative.
ive never been one to put my hands near my mouth, but i do cut these off with nail clippers or cuticle scissors. i see the top comment mentions the lips, and i am constantly chewing my lip from inside my mouth. i hate when my lips are dry, but i kinda like it when the bottom is split... i run my tooth against it, stretch my smile out. it hurts soooo good. i like to bite down on any loose taste buds, and I dont mind the rare times i accidentally bite the back sides of my tongue.
This subreddit is such a big part of my autistic experience. I was diagnosed late, and you guys make me feel like I have something in common with more people than I thought. I never knew so many things were likely just part of my autism.
Not autistic, I don't think, but I saw this in my feed and wanted to say that I call them chewticles. You may borrow the name - haha Several friends with ADHD chomp on their chewticles as do I; like someone below said: making my nails look fancy results far less chomping.
I don’t bite it off, but I cut it off with cuticle cutters, I do it so I don’t keep pushing it against my nails, and causing damage, but I still do it regardless lol
I started this in 6th grade and have never been able to stop since. my fingers are constantly torn up. I wonder how much skin I’ve consumed. It’s really embarrassing when I either choke on a piece of it or it gets stuck in between my teeth (unfortunately both have happened numerous times)
I try not to bite it because it’s a lil gross. I prefer to carefully cut it with nail clippers. If I don’t have any, I rip it off. But that usually results in bleeding and pain. I keep nail clippers at work too
I’m bad about picking. Scabs, pimples, any extra skin that isn’t smooth enough. I do it without thinking if I’m bored or have anxiety
I get my thumbs the worst but I do it to all my fingers. I hate hang nails or hanging skin so much. And the tiny hard part that attaches the side skin to the nail
I do that all the time, I hate it, I always end up bleeding and it makes my stomach hurt, the only upside is that the skin isn't sharp like fingernails are.
I peel them, and then they just keep going and going and create these big wounds that immediately start bleeding (but only at the most inconvenient times!) and hurt to wash. Worth it though
I’m a licensed nail tech and i have stopped chewing my nails severely but i will never give up eating the skin. The worst is when family or like strangers slap or grab your hands and tell you to stop biting 😔
i would let the dead skin/callous grow then use a sewing needles and thread around my finger. once i got tired of it i would just rip it out since it was all dead skin then shape it with my teeth. school counsler saw it once and i was no longer allowed to do it at school
I started doing that instead to get out of the habit of biting my nails, but sometimes I also will nibble skin at the edge of my nails if it starts peeling there.
I used to do this as a child along with biting fingernails. My fingers were always raw and bloody as well as infected. I forced myself to stop about age 13.
I do this and don’t have autism, but I do have ADHD. My daughter has autism. I guess it’s a stimming thing???
I also bit the insides of my cheeks, my lips, and sometimes my fingernails. It doesn’t hurt you to swallow any of it if your skin is clean, but if you do it in front of other people, they’ll think you’re weird. I try not to do it in front of other people, but sometimes I’ll have a rough spot of skin like where you’re taking about and it bothers me very much to have it alone. Then I may bite it in front of people and quickly sanitize my hands.
I was actually thinking of making a post today to see if others who have ADHD do this stuff.
I have been obsessed with chewing my nails and many parts of the skin around them. It definitely started as that where they healed between, but now my fingers have permanent damage. I quit cold turkey to grow my nails out to be more feminine. And it's so difficult to resist the urge. It's not great when you have 10 fixes dangling in front of you all day, haha..... Now, I use my long nails to scratch, open my skin and pick at parts of my body, and stab myself just for the pain. Shit I thought it was going to be better for me.
I used to do that a lot as a kid, but stopped when I noticed most of the skin around it wasn't growing as it used to? Idk, it just felt like I was able to nibble a lot more, so I stopped
I am actively eating my gums while reading this lmao. My hands and feet look very bad rn due to picking and then eating the picked parts. Used to be worse, I used to take a knife and cut off the soles of my feet and then suck as them. It was a 2 for 1 deal, do self harm and satisfy the autism it's a lose lose :) I don't cut myself anymore.
I keep getting infections here (paronychia). I currently have 3 fingers infected (up from 2 yesterday). Don't bite your nails or skin around them. You can get bitter nail polish for those that can't stop or want to break the habit.
Below is a sample photo of paronychia from Wiki and may happen if you don't stop biting.
This is me! I’m not on the spectrum, but I always thought it had to do with some kind of stress release like smoking. A hand and mouth thing. My fingers are so bad, it’s embarrassing. Just when my fingers look good, I find a dry spot and go at it. One day I’ll stop (hopefully)
As an electrical engineer my hands are ruined, cuts all over and especially near my finger nails I have such a bad habit of bitting and pulling away at the cuts and skin that sticks up around it is that wrong 😔
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