The Cellar Image of the Day

You can pick your friends, and you can pick your ears, but you can't......

Neatorama points to these two combination earwax spoon/ toothpick, antiques.

Discovery News.

Quote:

Sterling Silver Ear Picker Pin
A status symbol and hygienic tool, this ear picker/tooth cleaner was found at the James Fort site by APVA Preservation Virginia archaeologists. The 17th-century English knew about plaque, which they called scale or surf, and were encouraged by doctors to scrape their teeth frequently. They also knew that a buildup of earwax could cause deafness. As was the fashion for many of these tools, our ear picker is double-ended, combining the function of an ear scoop with that of a nail/tooth cleaner. Ear pickers were used by all levels of society in medieval and post-medieval England, but ours, being silver, probably belonged to a gentleman.

Hygiene is important! These people just valued it so much that they even made tools out of precious metals for...a classier experience? I guess this shows that pretty much anything can be made from gold and silver.

I wonder when these tools went out of fashion in the West. And why. People still have earwax, right? People should still groom themselves, right?
I have a little earwax spoon/keychain that I bought in China a few years ago for about 2 cents. (They're mass-produced in steel, not silver) It's a handy little tool.

Gold and silver for earwax and tartar removal, but I guess they used the old farmer's blow to clean their noses. Now I'm going to stop thinking about these things for the rest of my life.

depends on the diameter of the ear canal. My wife, poor thing, has small diameter ear canals and can't insert the q-tip into the canal. It just mushes the wax back into the canal opening.

I, on the other hand, get an eargasm every morning.

I am surprised to find so many q-tip junkies. I thought my every-day-without-fail habit was rare.

count me in -yes even us skanky Europeans like clean ears. forget the tooth pick though -that would entirely ruin our image....

I get hard wax build-up. It can't be removed with cotton buds (pokey sticks in our house) although I use them to keep the outer ear clean.

Fot a true eargasm, there's nothing like feeling a big piece of wax come free after days of putting olive oil in your ears, Then working it out. It's amazing. The only thing that comes close is getting a bogey that's attached all the way to your throat, and that's just chance after all.

Anybody ever done any ear-candling? I know we have some hippies here.

In this way, I address the hippies apart from myself, thus minimizing my own patchouli stink.

My wife has, I have resisted her cajoling to try it myself.

Deep Q-Tips make me sneeze, somehow.

When you put the Q-Tip in your ear, do you uncontrollably scratch your belly with your back foot?

I like ear candling, its eargasmistic for me...but I am sooooo there will you Sundae and Brian.

Anyone remember the cartoon: A man chopping down a tree, removing all the branches & bark, wadding both ends of the tree, lifting it with a helicopter ..... and Q-tipping the Mount Rushmore heads :p

You can save yourself the undignified position when ear candling, and just let it burn on the counter. It will "suck out" just as much gunk! Sorta like those body-purifying foot-baths.

I assume you're not speaking from experience HM, since you can see the gunk in the candle stub, and in your ear, and you can feel the suction throughout your sinuses.
There is definitely gunk being sucked out - whether its beneficial or not is debatable though.

We do ear candling on occasion (yes, we are Pagan Polyamorous Hippies). It seems to work, defying all reason.

If the bottom of the candle has an airtight seal, it produces that residue. A above water, B in the water, E in the ear.

Quote:

Andrew Harter took over the design and implementation of the test. A student of his volunteered to be the subject. The results are shown here. The candle stubs have been cut open and spread to examine the inner surfaces. First, look at specimen E1. This came from the first of three candles burned in the one ear. There is a quantity of very fine beige-colored dust/ash that has formed a fragile, porous structure not unlike cigarette ash in consistency but somewhat lighter in weight and strength. Specimen E2 is very similar. But E3 has a decided difference; at the places indicated by the X pointers, we found very serious gobs of a sticky, waxy, dark brown substance. To all of us, this certainly resembled ear-wax! At points indicated by the Y pointers, we saw very slight, somewhat lighter-colored, traces of a waxy deposit. Hmmm!

Had the experiment gone just this far, we might have concluded that there is merit in the ear-candling procedure. But Andrew was intent on conducting control tests, too. By that, we mean doing the same test without the ear being involved. He placed a candle, properly seated in the paper shield, over a glass with some water in it. The candle burned down just as before, but as you will see on specimen A, no deposit of any kind was produced, no beige-colored "ash," nor any brown waxy substance. But now I will reveal to you a fact that may provide you with an important clue: the candles were impregnated with bees-wax, not candle-wax nor paraffin wax! (British readers, note: in the USA we use the word "paraffin" to describe a translucent white wax, while you use that word for what we call "kerosene." Isn’t cultural exchange wonderful?)

Bees-wax varies in color from amber to brownish. When charred, it turns quite dark brown, the color of the globules we found at position X in our illustration. But what about specimen B? Well, that was obtained when Andrew burned another candle over water, but this time inserted the tapered end into the water, sealing it off. The B specimen cannot be differentiated from E3! Now, there is a small deposit indicated by the Y pointers on all specimens except A. We believe that specimen A, having clear access to air drawn in from the bottom by convection, attained complete combustion, and thus consumed all the wax and fabric. Specimen B, cut off from free air access as were the three E specimens, produced gobs of beeswax and some ash. E1 and E2 did not produce wax globules because the "fit" was not as tight; warmed ears can produce a film of naturally-present wax that will provide the seal, and the subject is perhaps more willing to have the tube stuck into his ear further and tighter, and less afraid of getting an ear-canal full of hot bees-wax — not a nice thing to contemplate. Thus the combustion in a sealed-off tube is less efficient, and the brown bees-wax globules are produced.

I am surprised that no one has mentioned the grossness of having the toothpick and the ear spoon on one tool. I try to keep my teeth out of my ears and vice versa.

Silver and gold have antibacterial qualities that even surpass Chinese stainless silver. And certainly Q tips.

Ear candles have been known to drip crud into the ear canal making for some very uncomfortable ER visits.