As shown above, in the toiletry bag I take on overnight trips there is a travel pack of thirty Q-tips (cotton swabs). I use them for removing water from my ear canals after a shower. (When I was much younger, I instead used to just tilt my head and jump up and down). But on the back of that package it says:
“If used to clean ears, stroke swab gently around the outer surface of the ear without entering the ear canal.
WARNING:
Use only as directed. Entering the ear canal could cause injury. Keep out of reach of children.”
How did I learn to stick Q-tips in my ear canals? An article by Nathaniel Meyersohn at CNN Business on June 25, 2022 titled How we got addicted to using Q-tips the wrong way (and repeated at EastIdahoNews) described magazine ads done long ago featuring that use for them. He included an image captioned:
“A Q-tips advertisement in Life magazine from 1956. Some ads around the period showed men cleaning water out of their ears with Q-tips.”
I went looking for one at the Internet Archive. As shown above, page 59 in the October 14, 1957 issue of Life has that exact detail. My parents may have read similar ads, and then told me about using Q-tips.
There is a brief article titled Use and abuse of cotton buds (the British term for swabs) by Jonathan C. Hobson and Jeremy A. Lavy in the August 2005 issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. As shown above via a bar chart, they report results from a survey of 171 people who said why they used cotton buds (aka swabs). 52% said Because it seemed like a good idea, 28% said Family and friends use them, 12% were Not sure, 5% had No reply, 3% were Advised by a doctor, 2% were Advised by a nurse, and the remaining 2% said Advertising. On May 16, 2017 I blogged about how Cotton swabs are sending about 34 children to the emergency room daily
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