Cotton bud in ear: Why can’t we resist the temptation despite the warnings?
Years ago, my mother complained about a terrible earache. The pain was unbearable, and it wouldn’t go away. For a week, she walked around with a debilitating ringing in her head. Eventually, she recalled to me the other day, the discomfort led her to a doctor, who carefully pushed an otoscope into her ear. Within seconds, he pulled it out and looked her in the face.
“Have you been putting Q-tips in your ears?” he asked with a disapproving tone.
Familiar in Britain, “Q-tips” is the name of the proprietary brand of cotton-swab, or bud, in America. And like so many others, my mother had been using them to clean her ears. But in doing so she was also messing with a natural process. Her ear was hurting because she had an ear infection, and there’s a decent chance her routinely using cotton buds had helped to cause it.
“Promise me something,” the doctor told her. “Promise me you’ll never put another Q-tip inside of your ear.”
Cotton buds are one of the most perplexing things for sale in the West. Plenty of consumer products are widely used in ways other than their core function – books for levelling tables, newspapers for keeping fires aflame, soda water for removing stains, coffee tables for resting legs – but these swabs are distinct. They are one of the only, if not the only, major consumer products whose main purpose is precisely the one that the manufacturers explicitly warn against.
The little padded sticks have long been marketed as household staples, pitched for various kinds of beauty upkeep, arts and crafts, home-cleaning, and baby care. And, for years, they have carried an explicit caution – every box of Q-tips comes with this caveat: “Do not insert inside the ear canal.” But everyone – especially those who look into people’s ears for a living – know that many, if not most, ignore the warning.
“People come in with cotton-swab-related problems all the time,” says Washington otolaryngologist Dennis Fitzgerald. “Any ear, nose and throat doctor in the world will tell you they see these all the time. People say they only use them to put make-up on, but we know what else they’re using them for. They’re putting them inside their ears.”
While Q-tips were never sold for use deep inside the ear, it took around half a century for manufacturers to explicitly warn against it. Originally, the versatile little household staple was the brainchild of a man named Leo Gerstenzang, who thought of wrapping cotton tightly around a stick after watching his wife preen their young child. She was using a toothpick with a cotton ball on the end to carefully apply various things to the baby, a clever but easily improved trick.
