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.

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.

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.

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.

When you say they don't work, do you mean they don't cut, or they just feel awkward?

If they don't cut, it's because your fingers are pulling the blades apart instead of pushing them together.

If they just feel awkward, it's because the blade that is on "top" is obscuring your view of the cut, because the sharp edge is facing away from you.

Rotating the scissors doesn't turn them into the other kind for the same reason that rotating yourself doesn't turn you into a mirror image.

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.

I do still resent it though.

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.

if you look far and wide you can find left hand firearms components but the price climbs up