What Can Your Earwax Reveal About Your Health?

Luckily, this aural secretion does have a couple of redeeming qualities. First, it protects our ears from stuff like dirt, bacteria, and water – and second, it can apparently tell you a lot about your health.

The color of health

Mostly, earwax is a kind of orangey color – though, technically, it starts off pale yellow and gets darker with age as it gathers dirt and bacteria. Pretty much any shade between that and amber-brown is okay, but there are some colors that should sound the alarm bells.

“You should call a healthcare provider if you have earwax that’s [g]reen,” advises Cleveland Clinic. “This color could mean you have an ear infection.”

Similarly, black earwax “is often seen in people with an earwax blockage,” they explain. “Brown with red streaks […] may indicate an injury inside your ear canal,” and “[if] you also have runny discharge, it might mean you have a ruptured eardrum.”

The smell of sickness

What your earwax looks like can tell you a lot about what’s going on inside your ears – but perhaps surprisingly, what it smells like can tell you important information, too.

Take maple syrup urine disease – a rare metabolic disorder that is sadly much more real and devastating than its name would suggest. It’s congenital, meaning you’re born with it, and fatal within a few months if left untreated. And one of the easiest ways to diagnose it? Sniffing earwax.

“The earwax literally smells like maple syrup,” Rabi Ann Musah, an environmental chemist at Louisiana State University, told BBC Future back in April. “So within 12 hours of the birth of the baby, when you smell this distinct and lovely smell it tells you that they have this inborn error of metabolism.”

If the earwax is musky rather than sweet, there’s another potential culprit: Parkinson’s disease. In the early 2010s, a former nurse from the UK named Joy Milne surprised all the experts by proving that she could smell the presence of the condition, and before long, researchers were developing diagnostic tests based on her ability. Now, researchers from Zhejiang University have developed a screening system that analyzes the odor of earwax: the high-tech sniff test “categorized with 94 percent accuracy ear wax samples from people with and without [Parkinson’s Disease],” the team announced in June this year.

Feeling poorly

So, you can see signs of ill health in your earwax, and you can smell them – but can you feel it? This one is a little more controversial, and certainly not as definitive, but there is some evidence that the feel of your earwax might be linked to your chances of developing cancer.

“As it turns out, the type of ear wax one has is linked to a gene that leads to bad odors from one’s armpit,” said Gerald Weissmann, then Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal, back in 2009. A Japanese study had just linked the ABCC11 gene to the presence of wet earwax – the type found more commonly in white and black people, as opposed to East Asians, and one that had long been associated with a higher incidence of breast cancer. 

In that respect, the presence of the gene – and as a proxy, the goopy wax – “may [be] lifesaving clues to the early detection and treatment of breast cancer,” Weissmann said.

Sounds convincing, right? But within a couple of years, further evidence from a wider sample of women with the gene seemed to pour water on the findings – not because wet earwax isn’t linked to the gene, but because it wasn’t linked to the cancer.

“We hypothesized that this ABCC11 SNP may be associated with breast cancer risk because an association has been reported between wet earwax and increased risk of breast cancer,” researchers wrote in 2011. “We therefore analyzed the frequency of the functional SNP in 1342 cases and 2256 controls from two breast cancer studies of Caucasian women but found no evidence for an association with breast cancer risk.”

What makes earwax so useful?

Evidently, earwax holds the answers to many diagnostic questions. Which raises an interesting question: why?

You might think blood would be a better thing to screen, and of course sometimes it is – but there are some categories of illness for which earwax is better. 

“The compounds that you find in blood tend to be water soluble, whereas earwax is a very lipid-rich substance, and lipids don’t like water,” Perdita Barran, a chemist and professor of mass spectrometry at the University of Manchester, told BBC Future. “So if you only study blood, you only get half the picture.”

“Lipids are the canary in the coal mine molecules,” she explained. “They’re the ones that really start changing first.”

So useful is our ear gunk for diagnosis purposes that, in one 2019 study, researchers were able to tell with perfect accuracy which of more than 100 earwax samples came from patients with cancer and which were from healthy volunteers. 

Interestingly, exactly which cancer was present couldn’t be distinguished – only that something was up. That’s another clue pointing to earwax’s role as a metabolic marker, according to Nelson Roberto Antoniosi Filho, a professor of chemistry at the Federal University of Goiás in Brazil and one of the team that made the discovery. 

“Although cancer consists of hundreds of diseases, from a metabolic point of view, cancer is a single biochemical process,” he told BBC Future. And being able to detect it within earwax could be an incredible tool for treating it. “Considering that medicine indicates that most cancers diagnosed at stage 1 have up to a 90 percent cure rate, it is conceivable that the success in treatment will be much higher with the diagnosis of pre-cancer stages,” Antoniosi Filho said.

So, next time you pick up a Q-tip, remember how you should absolutely never put them in your ears and put it back, resolving instead to let your ears clean themselves out as nature intended. Rest assured that the gunk you’re leaving in your ear canal isn’t just keeping your eardrums safe from dirt – it’s also a potential clue about your health.

All “explainer” articles are confirmed by fact checkers to be correct at time of publishing. Text, images, and links may be edited, removed, or added to at a later date to keep information current.  

The content of this article is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers with questions you may have regarding medical conditions.