Cecil, just noticed an old column on earwax and roaches. Having my own problems of this sort, I thought I’d pass on a better method than any you listed: ear candles.
These are hollow candles made (I guess) by wrapping gauze around a stick and dipping it in wax. One end is tapered, and if you lie down, stick the tapered end in your ear, and light the other end, you can spend twenty delightful minutes listening to wax being sucked out from your ear. If you don’t believe that it’s really happening, just cut open the candle when it burns out because it’s too full of wax to keep burning…
Lovely invention, available at many health food stores.
Yeah – as Cecil points out, the wax that fills a used ear candle is NOT from your ear. Try burning one of those things outside your ear. The results are exactly the same.
Cecil’s story is entertaining, accurate, and a lot like an experience I had some years back with a group of friends, some of whom were ear candle devotees. Having a good bit of physics and aerodynamics background, I was highly skeptical that a little flame could vacuum out earwax, but why not see what happens?
We tried it on a couple of subjects, with the cone sticking up vertically! Not something I wanted to try, tho no one got burned. Obvious first test: taste. And no, the candle wax, tho the approximate color of earwax (yet quite a bit harder), was not bitter. Next test, burn a candle held in hand. Same result. I laughingly suggested that it was quite a candle, as it could suck the wax out of my ear, through my head and chest, down my arm, and out through my hand - painlessly!
One more thing I figured out, which seems to fortuitously save most people from nasty burns: The first thing the candle does is to drop a great deal of vaporized-then-condensed wax “smoke” down the cone, before enough wax melts to start dripping. The wax fog concentrates at the small lower end of the tube, and forms a kind of light cottony matrix. Then when the hot wax falls, the cottony condensed wax catches it - at least most of the time. Maybe you’re even better off with the cone vertical rather than tilted at a steep angle, which might get the hot wax blobs rolling so they aren’t stopped by the “net” at the bottom. Who knows? Something this silly isn’t worth a whole lot of research. In our experiments, nobody got hurt, but I sure wouldn’t recommend sticking them in your ears.
Well, I shouldn’t say nobody got hurt. One candle fan on hand got his ego bruised rather severely, and had an intense, almost violent emotional reaction that took me by surprise. I’d recommend a great article at http://www.csicop.org/si/2000-11/beliefs.html for a better understanding of that phenomenon.
This all sounds quite convincing. However, I have used ear candles made with pink “wax”, like regular cheapo candles, instead of beeswax. The accumulated interior goo was the same color as that found inside of beeswax ear candles. Any explanations?
