When I dive in the pool/sea why don’t they?
Because you have a tympanic membrane (ear drum) inside your ear blocking water.
::smack::
Coupled water surface tension with the fact that your ear canal is curved and it does a pretty good job of keeping water out of the inner ear.
Dive in the water, turn your head in the right angle, and shake it a little. Your ears will get plenty of water in them.
Is that you knocking water out of your ears? 
Of course they do - if they didn’t, there would be no need for products such as this.
When scuba diving it can be uncomfortable when your ear canal doesn’t fill with water near the surface.
Mostly off-topic:
At one point I was able to blow little bubbles of air out my ear when equalizing. It made an interesting noise when my ear canal was filled with water.
Usually your ear canal would fill with water. Then there’s the eardrum, and behind that is the middle ear. This is a chamber with bones and stuff, and it’s the one that you have to “pop” which means to equalize the pressure with the outside world, by way of the eustachian tubes. The inner ear is the part where the actual sensors and nerves are.
Normally the eardrum seals the middle ear from the ear canal, unless it has been ruptured for some reason. I think they sometimes put a hole or tube in a person’s eardrum if they have too much trouble with fluid in the middle ear. (That tends to happen in an ear infection.)
??? I don’t get this, sorry.
39 years of Scuba experience, and I find it most comfortable when my ear canal does not fill with water.
This filling happens much more often when snorkeling, because as **BubbaDog ** said, it’s a lot easier to achieve when maneuvering one’s head around, whereas I very often come out of a 40 or 50 minute Scuba diving excursion with no annoying water gurgling in myu ears every time I bend down.
Not trying to be annoying or anything, just confused, sorry
There IS no need for that product. It’s 95% rubbing alcohol. Just buy some generic rubbing alcohol, put it in a plastic squirt bottle, and you’ve saved yourself not only three bucks on price, but also shipping and the wait time. And you get 16 ounces, rather than one. What a ripoff that product is.
A pharmacist told me about this after about the third time I showed up with a prescription for ear infections. I’m still pissed that the doctors never told me about this.
I’ve never had an ear infection since. (I swim every day.)
Heh, you’re completely correct, of course. I DO buy the product, but I buy it for the plastic squirt bottle, not the contents. Where do you get a plastic squirt bottle like the Swim Ear one that’s refillable?
But, of course, there’s another reason your ear canal doesn’t fill with water when you jump into a pool, and that is that there’s air in it. And water often goes in so far, but can’t get farther because of the air that’s trapped between the water and the eardrum. That’s the reason, as has been aluded to above, that turning your head around and over, etc., in the water, does allow water to fill the canal. It’s much the same thing you’d have to do if you were going to try to fill a piece of garden hose with water by immersing it into a sink. Namely, you have to turn it and lift different parts of it to allow the air to rise to the surface of the water that is inside it, so that the water can go into the spaces formerly occupied by the air. Your ear canal is not a straight tube, either. Same deal.
Try getting a squeeze-bulb used for flushing your ears out. Depress the bulb, stick the nozzle in the bottle of alcohol, and allow the bulb to reinflate. Insert in ear, depress gently, et voila! Reusable bottle! For those of you suffering from earwax, try hydrogen peroxide mixed with a small amount of glycerin instead of the expensive bottled concoctions, too. Remember, irrigate GENTLY.
I can pinch my nose shut and blow air out through my right eye, near my tear duct. It’s not exactly something that would get Annie Savoy all hot and bothered, but it’s a fun trick.
As captivating as that must be - I’d much prefer to have a talent that would work those wonders on Susan Sarandon.
Sorry to raise a zombie, but I didn’t catch this question:
That’s one way, but you can buy a palm-sized squirt bottle at Rite Aid, Thrifty, or a 99 Cents store for less than a dollar. It’s probably easier than using an ear syringe and carrying around the whole bottle of rubbing alcohol.
When I put ear drops in my ear (usually for infections), I could swear I have the sensation of them coming out the corner of the eye near the nose. Why?
Your statement is accurate, but possibly confusing. When I first read it, I thought you were saying that 95% of the product is rubbing alcohol, and took exeception.
Most “rubbing alcohol” is actually 30% water…not good in this application. If you take care to buy rubbing alcohol that is 95% (or higher) isopropanol, than that will work fine for ear drying…which is what I now realize you are saying.
The question is moot. Even if it’s only 70% alcohol, it still does the job. And, in fact, the pharmacist first told me to use gin, which is less alcohol.
The fact that a bottle of rubbing alcohol is 30% water isn’t going to change the effect. (And that water is sterile.) The alcohol will cause ALL the water in the ear canal to evaporate. Ordinary, cheap, drug store rubbing alcohol IS good, and there’s nothing confusing about it. If you’re a daily swimmer, try it yourself.