Lee Redmond (USA) set a new world record on TV show Lo Show dei Record in Madrid, Spain, on 23 February 2008. After nearly 30 years of growth, her nails measure a total of 8.65 m (28 ft 4.5 in); the longest nail is that on her right thumb, which alone is 90 cm (2 ft 11 in).
 
"I started to grow my nails in 1979...it was kind of a challenge to myself to see how far they would go before they started twisting out of shape."
 
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Sadly, Redmond lost her nails in a road accident the following year; however, she still retains the record for longest female fingernails ever.
 
 
"It becomes your identity - and it felt like I had lost part of that. People ask if I'm going to grow them again and I say no. It was a one-time thing and it took me thirty years to grow them."
 
GWR Editor-in-Chief Craig Glenday recounts his first, nerve-wracking meeting with Lee.
 
"When I first met the wonderful Lee Redmond, I was playing the role of chauffeur. I'd been asked to collect Lee and her granddaughter at Heathrow and bring then back to GWR Towers without any fuss."
 
"This was a few years back, and my first experience of the airport run. I've since welcomed the likes of smallest man He Pingping and tallest man Xi Shun to the UK, but this was my first experience waiting in the throng of expectant families and anxious girl - and boyfriends for a record holder."
 
Longest fingernails meeting Guinness World Records 60th 
Lee meets fellow record holder Melvin Boothe in 2009
 
"I was getting increasingly nervous as every moment passed what if she never made the connecting flight? Had she even left Utah? If she did make the flight, was it comfortable? The launch of the 2007 book was relying on her cooperation with the press and without Lee, there'd be no launch! Yet we'd never met her! What would she be like? What kind of a woman would grow her nails like giant talons?"
 
Craig talks more about the longest fingernails record holders he's had the fortune to have met in the video below.