Yeah yeah TMI, it’s not like the title is coy about it, If ya clicked, you want it.
So I learned something new this morning. That there are two different types of ear-wax, wet and dry and that Asians and Europeans typically have different types. I had never heard that before, until I was looking at Wikipedia for Earwax.
But my basic question, which drove me to look up earwax in the first place, is how common is ear"wax"? I seem to only have ear grease. I have never encountered anything solid at all. I remember the Mythbusters where they tried to make a Shrek style earwax candle. Which was the first time I realized that there is actual wax for some people. They were able to pull chunks from people and form it into a candle. Which is something you could never do with my ear-grease. It would be like “forming a candle” out of room temperature bacon grease, it is just not solid enough to do that. It’s would ooze out of shape quickly.
Now maybe I am wrong and there are thick waxy hunks deep in my ears. But the doctor has never mentioned it while using the ear-lighty-looky thing. I have never had them cleaned in any way. I have a box of Q-tips that I have had for 10 years, and is still well over half full. Every once in a couple months one ear or the other feels weird, and I swab around the hole, and it come back yellow and my ear feels better, but no solids. I have never noticed waxy solids on my pillow in the morning, nor do I power wash my ear in the shower or anything. So If I have some, the earwax fairy must be collecting them while I’m not watching.
Do most people encounter candleable pieces of earwax?
I had my ear syringed as a teen, and there was a pea-sized lump of really dark wax in there, the nurse doing it showed me it. I think she told at the time that it was unusual to find quite that much wax, but my ears seem to produce a lot of it. I’ve never tried making a candle, but I bet I could.
I never thought I had earwax, either. Same Q-Tip experience you describe. Then my ear started hurting. The doctor checked, and said it was wax. They did an ear lavage, which is a fancy way of saying they attacked my ear by forcefully squirting water into it until I was dizzy and nauseated, and a giant hunk of wax eventually came out. Weird thing is that my other ear was perfectly fine.
I could probably fill up a Bed, Bath, and Beyond with ear wax candles. I produce copious amounts of it. Every couple of years one of my ears gets plugged and I have to get them cleaned out, which yields either lots of little chunks or one super-gross Vulcan-sized big chunk.
I get a lot of solid wax and for the longest time I kept having to have my ears irrigated because it would block my ear canal and muffle sounds. Finally, one of the doctors finally decided to tell me to never use Q-tips on anything except the outside part of my ear. Apparently, even if you’re getting wax out when you use it on your ear canal, you’re also pushing a lot into the canal. So I’ve stopped using Q-tips in my ears and haven’t had to have them irrigated any more.
And one more thing I’d like to say, just out of curiosity, my daughter is half-Japanese. I’m curious to see what her ear wax looks like! Haven’t had the chance yet though lol
My typical encounter with ear goo is when a semisolid crumb of same breaks loose and falls into the outer ear. It seems fibrous in character, although maybe it’s just catching fine strands of inner ear fuzz.
In younger days I would get swimmers’ ear or earache and would have my ears flushed, yielding the much vaunted solid ball of golden brown shit. Sometimes Doc would allow me to inspect same. Interesting.
This reminds me of when one of my (half-white/half-Asian) kids was a baby, and I kept finding what looked like baguette crust crumbs in his ears. I felt like a slob mom, since I often held him while eating. It turned out that he had inherited the Asian-style dry ear wax from his dad. I’d never seen it before.
A few years back my ears were so full of compacted wax that I was practically deaf. OTC ear drops did nothing.
I went to an ENT doc and he scraped out (yes, scraped; NOT a pleasant experience) a huge amount of thick chunks of yellow/brown wax from both ears. I’m sure I’m wildly exaggerating but it felt and looked like it could have filled a Dixie cup. My hearing immediately came back to normal and I remember everything seemed EXTREMELY LOUD for at least a week afterwards; I guess I had just gotten used to everything sounding like I was wearing muffs all the time. It did make the subway and walking around in the city kind of bizarrely serene, though.
Like the OP, I have “ear grease”, although occasionally I get a little tiny “chunk” of something more solid within the grease. I guess that’s the wet kind.
And I totally use Q-Tips inside my ears, even though I tell everyone not to. I’m an eargasming hypocrite.
Mine’s yellow to slightly orangey and “wet” mostly, though if my ears start to get itchy it means there’s a buildup and a Q-tip is needed. But what I collect is still quite soft and only looks formed because it’s how the Q-tip scooped it. Seems to go with the rest of me, I’m very oily from head to toe.
Mine is like Play-Doh. I can get a hunk about half the size of a pea maybe 3-4 times a year. And this may sound gross, but if you take the wax and kind of roll it with a finger on top of a table, you can make a wax string a little thinner than kite string.
Not usually a problem. Showering seems to manage it except once or twice a year it doesn’t and I pretty much can’t hear out of one ear. First time this happened was in college and I went to the doc. He scoped it and proceeded to rinse it out with a syringe. I promptly went out and purchased one of these. Like I said, it doesn’t happen often and when it does, it seems to be while sleeping. Anyway, it’s a minor annoyance and the periodic rinsing actually feels pretty good, not altogether unlike the feeling of reaming out the ear canal with a Q-tip, which you aren’t supposed to do. Use warm, not hot water and be gentle.
I don’t get impacted earwax. Now and then, a little flake of wax will migrate out of one ear or the other, but aside from that, it’s like there’s no wax at all. One of my daughters has the same type.
Mr. Legend, on the other hand, periodically gets giant gobs of dark wax plugging his ears, and our other daughter has the same problem. We discovered her earwax on vacation after she’d been swimming and her ear started to hurt. We used an OTC earwax removal kit (carbamide peroxide and a bulb syringe) and got pea-sized lumps of wax out of both ears. Ever since, she’s had to clean her ears twice a year.
I get mostly grease, with an occasional small solid. I used to use mostly cotton swabs to get it out, but I’ve had a fungus infection in my ears and had a doc rinse out the gunk when it got impacted and then all gross. Now I let the shower water run into and out of my ears every day, and that generally gets most of the stuff out. Sometimes I’ll use a cotton swab during allergy season, and sometimes I’ll very gently scrape the inside of the canal with the closed end of a bobby pin, which will remove quite a lot of grease AND the occasional small solid. My current doctor says that my ear canals are quite sanitary and pretty grease free, so I guess I’m doing what needs to be done.