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Q-tips suck at cleaning ear canals. All they do is push the damn ear wax further up inside, worsening my already bad tendency to get impacted wax in the first place. I can only imagine that people who use q-tips to clean have these cavernous canals that make family guy's ear-sex joke actually possible.
It's why I use those meant-for-glasses tiny screwdrivers.
My grandpa would just use the temples/end parts of his glasses to clean his ears...
So did mine! It's a worldwide old people thing
Or your grandpa had a secret other family.
They're actually shaped like the things you're supposed to use instead of Q-tips
This statement is upsetting.
I have a big head and have never understood this impacted wax you normies are always complaining about, so this Cavernous Canal Hypothesis actually makes a lot of sense to me.
Grampa tore his ear drum by using a metal screw...
Have you tried hydrogen peroxide?
It's much, much quicker, simpler, and easier to reach into the ear canal and gently scrape out the wax. The few times I used any fluid, it was a tiresome affair, and it never really got out all of the wax that could start to build. You would have to do it every other day to prevent real buildup, and that would be a gigantic pain.
Oh, I don't disagree regarding regular use being a pain. I used 3 q-tips after every shower (one per ear for the various crevasses, then the opposite ends of a shared one to - as you say - scoop from the main canal). For at least two reasons I wouldn't want to use peroxide that way every day.
However, twice in my life I've gotten my ears clogged to the point that q-tips just made it worse. In both of those cases, peroxide worked miracles.
The peroxide didn't work for me once the wax became impacted. Maybe if I had repeated it several times in the course of a day, but it was easier to just repeat the trip to the doctor to have them get it out. Losing your hearing absolutely sucks, and I didn't want to delay getting it back.
For me, the impaction was only mitigated after leaving the peroxide in for an extended period.
I did have a pool-related impaction one other time before I started using q-tips regularly. I went to the doctor for that and they pushed it out using some kind of manual water pump. It worked and the obstruction came out of my ear, but until that happened it felt like earwax (and water) were going to come out of my nose. I don't know if that's normal, but it was unpleasant.
One last mostly unrelated (and entirely unprompted) aside: my first encounter (that I remember, at least) with q-tips was right when I was a boy approaching puberty. My mother cleaned my ears with wet q-tips and I complained of the unpleasant feeling. She told me "if you don't keep your ears clean, no girl will ever stick her tongue down your ear!" At the time it sounded nice just to have any contact with a girl, but now that I'm an adult I have to avoid wondering about that sentence that my mother said to me.
I had a girlfriend when I was 16 that started licking my ear then tongued my ear hole while I was on the phone with my mom lying about where I was.
I'm 41 now and no one has ever done that again. It was unique.
I have licked an ear in an intimate situation. It wasn't too uncomfortable for me, and it was something they enjoyed the sensation of.
Tongue-ing the ear hole though??? That's fuckin evil.
Only time she ever did it. Punk yeenage rebellion top notch.
When I was in my early twenties, a girl I had a crush on but who was dating my friend came up behind me and scritched my head. I'm married to a different woman now and have a kid, but I still wonder about that interaction. I can relate.
Sounds like affectionate ruffling of hair to me. Nothing too uncommon?
No other woman has ever done that to me unless I was already in a relationship with them. I don't mind a casual hair ruffling, but if that's what it was it's still surprising to me.