When I think about human anatomy, I will admit I am slightly fascinated with ears. First, they come in all shapes and sizes, which makes “ear watching”, similar to “people watching”, a hilarious sport. Some ears stick out super far, like those of actors Channing Tatum and Daniel Craig, or those of former President Barack Obama, and some are neatly pinned against the head like actor Brad Pitt (yes, thank you for noticing I have focused on famous handsome men!). Some ears are hairless, and some have hair growing in many ridiculous directions (and here is a link to a very popular hair trimmer that Amazon can have to you by tomorrow…. https://www.amazon.com/Nose-Hair-Trimmer-Clipper-Battery-Operated/dp/B098NSHBQK/ref=zg_bs_234950011_1/139-7761432-7987065?pd_rd_i=B09VGLBWSK&th=1). Some ears have a single jeweled bauble, and some are pierced to the point of resembling Swiss cheese. Others are spiked, tunneled, or screwed, and you can see straight through the ear lobe. Many ears are large, and some are tiny. The inner ear does most of the work with respect to hearing, but the ears that stick out on both sides of our head are designed to help us hear better. So, we need these protrusions we pierce the heck out of, and behind which we push our hair, to hear best.
But my focus of this post is not on the size and shape of, or degree to which we decorate or alter, our ears. I would like to talk about hygiene. Ears, despite all their personality and interest, sometimes seem to me like the dirtiest parts of our body and the grossness factor is way up there! This is simply my public service announcement that we all safely clean our ears! Thanks for indulging me. Like many of you, I grew up with Q-tips, which are these brilliant 3-inch paper sticks with cotton swabbing at either end. And, also like many of you, I was raised to use a Q-tip every day to clean the inside of my ears. It just feels so good (some scientists say tickling the nerves in our ears is addictive), and I feel cleaner after I do it. And let’s be honest, we have all seen ear wax on those Q-tip swabs that makes us want to hurl and/or beam with pride that our body made that. Ear wax is a perfectly natural human lubricant, but I am still calling it what it is, which is gross.
In case you did not get the memo, doctors decided in the last 20 to 30 years, that it is actually not good practice to stick cotton swabs into our ears. In trying to clean, we apparently end up driving the wax into the eardrum, leading to possible infection and potential hearing loss, which does sound rather horrific. Today, the Q-tip brand no longer advertises their product for ear cleaning! If you read the packaging, you learn we can use them for applying and removing eyeliner and eye shadow, gently applying ointments and first aid creams, cleaning and dusting hard to reach spaces in our home and on our electronic devices, and baby care (…the photo they show is of a parent cleaning their baby’s toe with a Q-tip. Huh? Was that something I was supposed to do?!).
But here is the thing: Q-tips aside, I think we still really need to clean our ears. There is the inner ear that produces wax. And doctors now recommend we NOT clean that. So, let’s all agree we won’t stick Q-tips into our ear canals, no matter how good it feels. But since we aren’t sticking the Q-tips into our ear canals anymore, sometimes the ear wax starts pouring out and collecting where people can see it, which is gross. So maybe, just occasionally, we take a Q-tip to remove any wax that can be seen inside the ear, at the edge of the opening to the canal, but not inside the canal? Can we all agree to remove it, just to be polite? And then let’s focus on the part of the ear that is not quite in, and not quite out, which is filled with natural body oils, hair spray, hair gel, and soap we failed to rinse off when in the shower. It is like having two small half-buckets into which we collect all sorts of product. Let’s agree to wipe those out periodically with a tissue. Then there is the ear lobe and upper ear cartilage we like to pierce. For all earring wearers out there, we need to take our earrings out at night (1) to give our lobes a rest, and (2) to let things air out. Those holes into which we put all sorts of metal, can get a little raunchy when we don’t let them breathe. So let them breathe and put your earrings back in the next morning (…except people with newly pierced ears...those earrings must stay in place for some time while your ear heals around them). Then, the pièce de résistance! BEHIND the ears! We can all boast we do a great job of washing our hair, scrubbing our scalps, washing and/or shaving our faces and our necks, but how many of us take the time to carefully wash behind our ears?! I mean, the type of cleaning where we pull our ear flaps forward and really scrub behind our ears. That place behind our ears where sweat and oils collect is, for lack of a better word, scary.
So dear friends, I have decided we need to care for our ears a little like how we care for our teeth when we visit the dentist every six months, or how we detail our cars when there is an accumulation of dust and dirt in the dashboard crevices. Occasionally, do the deep cleaning that shows your auditory orifices some love. I know you are feeling slightly uneasy and disturbed by this post: Why on earth am I writing about ear hygiene? It’s pretty simple. I had a thought yesterday about how my children are not part of the Q-tip generation. They use Q-tips for makeup and other sundry purposes, but not ear cleaning, and my passing thought was, “If I died tomorrow, would my children live a lifetime with unclean ears!?” For all you fathers out there, this is an example of the types of crazy concerns over which mothers lose sleep.
But then I decided more than just my three children could potentially benefit from this auditory hygiene public service announcement: Don’t neglect your ears! I know you are grateful, and you are welcome. I hope after reading these five paragraphs of crazy, you will, at a minimum, enjoy some “ear watching” today (really, it’s so much fun), and maybe go one extra step with ear hygiene to be healthy and polite and “detail” your ears, Q-tips of course being optional.
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