You Can't Make Me Stop Using Q-Tips

Why aren’t we listening?

This week, health and medicine site STAT posed a question that gets asked a lot:

So I’d like to write down the answer someplace once and for all:

Because our ear canals are full of earwax.

At this point it’s probably safe to assume that many of us have heard, “Don’t use Q-Tips!” and maybe even “You’ll damage your hearing!” during our journeys through time and space. And yet, it seems, we do not give a shit. Why is that? Because we spend every waking hour combatting all of our other orifices, so it seems unseemly to just let one of them… be itself.

If there were a buildup of wax around your eyes, you’d wipe it off. Same is true of your mouth or your butt or your bellybutton. It’s part of our social contract to vigilantly monitor our secretions so that we can appear professional, fuckable, and sane. So turning that reflex off when it comes to your earwax buildup can be a hard habit to kick—like biting your nails.

The same way a lot of us will still eat sugar even though we know it’s poison, a lot of people are going to secretly clean their ears whether it’s dangerous or not. Having a body and a brain at the same time is complex. It’s fine.*

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*But also be safe out there tyvm.