Safety scissors are any scissors which have their design features altered to make them less potentially dangerous in the hands of a first-time user of scissors, such as a small child, or when handled by a person with a tremor or otherwise impaired manual dexterity.

The most common feature of safety scissors, across brands, is blunted or rounded tips, rather than sharply pointed tips which can pierce skin if grabbed roughly or dropped.

Some safety scissors are made of rigid plastic instead of steel, relying on lower hardness to limit their cutting power for anything other than paper and thread. Some safety scissors have only one of the blades sharpened, while the other is an unsharpened straight edge. These are sufficiently blunt that they can only efficiently cut more tearable materials, such as construction paper and thick yarn.

When I was a toddler, I got myself and my maternal grandmother in a great heap of trouble with my mother: Granny stepped out of the kitchen for a moment, leaving me with all-plastic, single-bladed safety scissors and some construction paper, and she came back to find I'd given myself a crooked haircut, right across my bangs at jagged angles.

Iron Noder 2018, 16/30

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