Does it work? Vacuuming my earwax with the Waxvac

My family and I are addicted to the gadgets and gizmos advertised on television that promise to improve our quality of life. When you see the logo “As Seen on TV” you know what you’re getting — and what you’re getting is probably a piece of crap. We’re not addicted to these things because they work, we’re addicted to them because we think they’re funny!

If you haven’t seen the commercial or the Waxvac, please, indulge yourself:

Yes, everybody in my family now shouts “OW!” any time a q-tip gets near their ear.

For Christmas, Susan and Mason decided it would be funny to get me a Waxvac. Last night I decided to give it a whirl to see if the thing sucked earwax, or simply sucked. Here’s my experience.

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Based on what I saw in the commercial, I was actually a little nervous about sticking the equivalent of a Hoover vacuum cleaner into my ear canal. If you watched the commercial you saw what I saw — the thing sucking up dirt and dust and, of course, earwax.

Step one was installing the two AA batteries. Despite having inserted AA batteries into things my entire life, I could not figure out which way the batteries were supposed to go. Fortunately they can only go four ways: ++. –. +-, and -+. I quickly discovered that the first two didn’t do anything; of the last two, one appeared to power the device but not the light, and the last combination I tried (of course) powered up both the device and the light. That must be right.

The next step was assembling the rubber tip designed to keep your ear safe and the actual device clean. The Waxvac comes with 8 rubber tips in 4 colors, presumably so each member of your family can use a different colored tip. I will just go ahead and tell you that this probably won’t be a problem in most families.

With the batteries and the rubber tip installed, I closed my eyes, held my breath, and stuck the Waxvac deep into my ear canal, leaving it there for over a minute as the instructions suggested. I removed the Waxvac and discovered…

…nothing.

I do not have amazingly clean ears. In fact, every time I cram a q-tip down in there like we all know we’re not supposed to do, it comes out yellow (or worse, brown). And yet, the Waxvac was unable to extract a single molecule of wax.

If you’re thinking by some miracle of nature my head is empty and all the wax from one ear somehow migrated over to the other ear, no such luck. The Waxvac came up empty on the other side as well.

Convinced I was doing something wrong, I resorted to pulling the instructions out of the trash and reading them. In retrospect I realize inserting a battery-operated device into your ear canal before reading the instructions might seem careless, but that’s how I roll. I thought by how poorly the device was functioning, I was doing something wrong.

Nope.

At that point, I began experimenting. I first removed the rubber tip and the plastic guard designed from keeping the stupid thing from going all the way down in your ear canal. It still got no wax. I then spit in my hand to see if the Waxvac would suck that up. Nope. At this point I was convinced that I had the batteries backwards and that it was blowing air into my ear instead of sucking air out, so I reversed the batteries. No difference.

The front half of the Waxvac pops off to allow for the removal of all the wax this thing (in theory) extracts. With the cone removed I could see the fan inside. I did some experiments. From 1/4″ away, the Waxvac would not pull a napkin from McDonald’s toward it, but if I unfolded the napkin so that it was only one sheet thick, and it would. This confirmed that I had the batteries in the proper direction. But if this thing isn’t strong enough to move a napkin from McDonald’s only a quarter inch away, what are the odds this thing will ever pull earwax out of my ear?

Based on my experience, not likely. As a last resort I checked Amazon and, sure enough, this product has a slew of one star reviews from customers with similar experiences.

One final complaint about the product: the fan inside the Waxvac is loud enough that for a good five minutes after using it, my ears were ringing and my hearing was worse than when I had started. My hearing eventually returned, but our $10 never will.