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The ends of your shoelace are coated with a hard plastic shell called an aglet, which protects the lace from unraveling.

The aglet is the plastic or crimped-metal cap at each end of the lace.

Finish off your sneaker with your choice of laces, varnish, and even the aglets, the metal pieces at the end of the laces.

Until then, and even through the early years of the 21st century, most hair ties were usually fastened together with metal aglets; those who can remember using them are wincing right now.

Some of the gaps were on telomeres, the caps at the ends of chromosomes that have often been compared to the aglets that protect the ends of shoelaces.