Im also like that..randomly mixed. I write left, but use scissors always with right. Throw and kick are right, but swing and bat is left. Computer mouse left. Taking a phone call is always left hand on left ear...but holding phone to use or text is always right hand. Self check out? Back to left hand for that mostly Lol. If a backpack is on one shoulder it feels weird if it's not on my left shoulder despite being more right "armed".
There's a slight pressure you put on the hinge when closing them. The handedness aligns the pressure to a closing motion laterally (keeping the blades together) as opposed to opening (pushing the cutting edges apart).
They do in fact make a difference. Trimming my beard with beard scissors requires a bit of a strange grip in my left hand to actually cut well when I switch sides.
Nail scissors can be quite the experience for a left-hander, instead of achieving the proper cutting/shearing motion it will just try to bend your nails due to the widened gap between the blades. A bit less painful but also annoying is cutting paper for the same reason.
A problem these days is that the scissors are sculpted.. they fit a right hand. But there are supposedly-left-handed scissors.. except that 99.9% of them are still crossing the blades the same way! My father bought one like that, as he was left handed. The scissors are mostly useless, at least for anything where you need that slight pressure to get a good cut.
Left-handed scissors are a thing. I own a couple of pairs but they feel funny because I've simply used right-handed scissors backwards most of my life.
One big difference is visibility. On right-handed scissors you can see the cut from the (top) left, while left-handed ones are the opposite. If you cut lefty with righty scissors you can't see what you're doing (unless you awkwardly hold everything to the right side).
There are also left-handed pens. They're geometrically identical to right-handed[1], but they contain faster-drying ink.
[1] Unless they are a high-end pen with a nub, rather than just a ballpoint. A pen with a nub may have left-handed or right-handed versions of the nub.
Apple Watch has a left hand mode. Just that the crown is pointing out from your hand (so you don’t accidentally press when you flex your wrist), and inside rather than outside toward your center.
Wait do people wear their watch on their dominant hand? I can’t do that, need to use that hand to manipulate the watch. Maybe because it’s a smartwatch.
It's not a scam. My son is left-handed and his left-handed scissors don't work for me, while my right-handed scissors don't work for him.
I have never understood why, though. In my mind, if you rotate the scissors 180 degrees, they should become the other kind (assuming the handles are symmetric, not those ergonomic asymmetric ones, I mean). And I just don't see why not no matter how hard I think. I'm not a dumb person but I have always had a particular weakness to understand certain spatial-related things, e.g. that method to change the duvet cover where you roll it and unroll it and when you unroll it it ends up inside... for me, it might as well be magic :D
I'm right-handed, and usually use scissors with my right hand. When I try using them with my left hand, two things happen: First, they doesn't sit right in my palm, because of the way they are sculpted. Beyond this, and more importantly, they are no longer as effective in cutting things.
Here's my understanding of why this is. When holding the scissors with your hands, in addition to the up-and-down force you exert on the blade with your fingers, you also exert a small side-to-side force with your fingers. With my right handed scissors in my right hand, this force pushes to the outside on the upper handle and to the inside on the lower handle. This force also makes the scissors feel more comfortable.
On the other side of the fulcrum, though, the upper handle controls the lower blade and the lower handle controls the upper blade. Here, the lateral forces end up drawing the blades closer together, giving a tighter pair of edges between which shearing forces are applied. This makes the cutting action more effective than if lateral forces were absent.
In my left hand, the (outside at the top and inside at the bottom) lateral forces end up pushing the blades further apart on the other side of the fulcrum. This reduces the shear force and makes the cutting action less effective.
To compensate for this while operating the scissors with your left hand, you would need to adopt a weird style: Consciously pull to the inside with your thumb, and to the outside with your remaining fingers. You'll notice that the scissors are now much more effective than before. It is also a deeply uncomfortable grip.
The issue is that scissors are (surprisingly) chiral sculptures. In the case of regular right-handed scissors, when viewed edge down, the handle closer to the viewer passes through the left of the fulcrum. I have never used a pair of left-handed scissors, but I would presume that for them, the closer handle passes through the right side of the fulcrum.
This is exactly right. Scissors depend on you to exert sideways pressure on the blades. It should be possible to build scissors with e.g. a spring at the joint that exerts the proper sideways force automatically. This is how paper cutters work. (A square surface with a blade on the side that swings down.)
There's more to a good pair of scissors (eg: Dressmakers scissors) than you may have considered.
Left and Right handed versions are asymmetric mirror images of each other than cannot be rotated to match.
Consider:
* Smaller top loop for thumb.
* Larger bottom loop for fingers.
* Loops have width and are bevelled; wider where the thumb first enters, narrower on the side the thumb comes out, these are shaped for comfort and control.
* The action of moving a thumb and fingers "up and down" has a slight twisting action to it that is factored into how the anvil and cutting blades of the scissors are arranged so that the left twist causes the blades to run tight against each other when left handed and mirrored for the right twist of the right hand.
The thing with scissors is, as a left handed person, you'll never find the "reversed" type so you learn to just use "regular" scissors pretty early on. This is probably true with a lot of things, honestly. Yeah I might theoretically be able to cut better with a left handed pair of scissors but since I've never come across a pair I never bothered.
Things get much more interesting with more complex things like golf, snowboarding & skateboarding, shooting, etc. These things all have left-hand optimized equivalants (eg: left handed clubs, snowboards with the bindings set top "goofy", guns with the safety on the opposite side, etc). In all cases its a tradeoff -- you can learn and get good on the equipment designed just for you and then wind up sucking when you are handed equipment that is used by most everybody else or you can just learn to use the "normal" equipment even if slightly suboptimal. Guns, for example, eject their used shells off the right side of the weapon--good luck getting one that ejects off the left side so you can old it opposite of everybody and not have hot metal land on your face.
Computer mice are the same deal... some of those bastards are even molded explicitly for right hand use and are pretty uncomfortable in the left hand.
Being left handed gets weird quick because you are in a minority that most product designers simply don't consider.
Scissors are one of those things that, as a mostly left-handed but extremely right-eye dominant person, I have always resented and found difficult, but using a quality pair of left-handed scissors is almost an epiphany when you realise exactly how inconvenient a lot of things in the world are just by virtue of your handedness. A significant number of cheap "left handed" scissors I've used in my life are right-handed scissors with a left-handed grip on them, and using them is more comfortable but no more precise.
All of that said, I've found the golden path of learning any new tool that has a specific handedness is just to practice doing it right handed. This is especially true of anything that is a kind of "place setting", I eat with a knife & fork in the right-handed pattern, I use a computer mouse with my right hand. If I'm going to sit down somewhere and have an array of items in front of me with an 'expected' handedness, I'll just do it that way.
Fly fish hemostats drive me nuts. The lock is much more challenging with your left. Fortunately they make mitten clamps that work well. Learning to whip finish a fly left handed was a challenge too, once you know you know; I had a miserable time trying to teach my right handed kids.
Have you ever fired an autoloader made for a right handed person, left handed?
It is truly terrifying the first time or two when a shell ejects and hits you in the face..
i have, and use goggles when going dual, also have left hand devices,ejecting to left, ive developed ambidexterity, but ultra fine motor tasks are left handed.
It's nicer to use right-handed scissors left-handed because you get an unobstructed view of the cut line. The children's stamped ones hurt your hand and the ergo ones are impossible but once you learn to keep the blades in shear it's a better experience than lefty scissors.
To be fair I've always used scissors with the blade pointing towards me because it always felt more natural despite being told off for using it the wrong way.
The trick to using right handed scissors as a lefty is you have to kind of pull in with your thumb where naturally you push down and out with your thumb. But once you figure that out, it isn't so hard. Still, my scissor game is laughable compared to my wife who can do that "sliding the open blade in a straight line to cut wrapping paper" thing that I always stuff up.
