This is What Would Happen If, a close examination of mundane hypothetical situations. Each week, we look at something that you could do but probably never would, and take it to its logical endpoint. This week: What would happen if you never took out your earbuds?​





How long have you left your earbuds in today? Let's assume you work a job that allows you to listen to music for the majority of the day. That's a good three to four uninterrupted hours of earbuds jammed into your ears. But what if you just never took them out? What would happen to your ears?

Dr. Anil K. Lalwani is an Otolaryngologist — an ear doctor. If there's anyone on the planet who can somewhat definitively say what might happen in the event of Endless Earbud Insertion, it's Lalwani. And according to him, it's not good.

What would not happen, Lalwani says, is your ears filling up with earwax, because that's just not how your ear works. Only the outer half of your ear canal produces wax, so jamming an earbud in there wouldn't create any sort of wax buildup, Lalwani says. In fact, the continual removal and insertion of earbuds is what leads to earwax impaction. "I've seen people take the earbuds and push the wax in," he says. "But not so much where the earbuds sit in there awhile and there's a ton of wax accumulating."

Keeping your earbuds in might save your ears from clogging up with earwax, but as a long-term strategy it's just not a good idea. Earbuds don't let anything in, but they also don't let anything out. "It tends to trap moisture, it tends to accumulate debris underneath it," says Lalwani. "So over time, what that'll do is cause infections where the earplug sits." Depending on how dirty and wet your ears are, this could happen within a matter of weeks.

Worse still, if you continue to keep those earbuds through infections, your ear canal will start to develop something known as a granuloma, a mass of inflamed tissue and something you should not Google. Eventually, the infection and granuloma could rupture your eardrum.

You'll be happy to know that in addition to infection, it gets worse. You see, the ear canal is made from two distinct things. The outer third is cartilage covered by skin, the inner two-thirds is bone covered by skin. Cartilage is relatively flexible, bone is not. Jamming an ill-fitting earbud deep into your ear canal is going to cause some irritation. Severe irritation.

"If you push something into the deeper two thirds of the ear canal where nobody ever goes, where it's just skin on top of the bone, that could cause erosions of skin over the bone in that area, exposing the bone of the ear canal," Lalwani says.

Of course this doesn't mean that you can't shove things into your ear canal and leave them there indefinitely. Lalwani points to Lyric, a hearing aid that, when fitted properly, is designed to sit deep within the ear canal for months at a time. A well-fitting Lyric can sit in someone's ear until the battery dies after three months. "it looks grimy when you take it out," he says. "But it doesn't look horrible."

The closest thing that you, an earbud-wearer, can get to the fit of a hearing aid are expensive studio monitors that are custom-molded to your ear canals. Granted, the custom-molding is more for the aural benefits — they apparently sound really great — and less so for the potential avoidance of ear canal erosion, so there's still a chance you'll get an ear infection.

While Lalwani has yet to personally encounter a case of a someone never taking out their earbuds, he does say that you could leave your earbuds in for a few days and you would be "probably okay." But, honestly, we can't think of a good reason why you might want to leave them in. So take them out.

Further Reading

The Mayo Clinic's Guide To Ear Infections

The Wirecutter's Guide To The Best Cheap Earbuds

WIRED's Guide To Properly Fitting Earbuds

Next Week

What would happen if you just never got out of your seat?

Got a burning (hopefully not in an infected way) hypothetical question? Submit it to [email protected].