How Do You Remove an Earbud Tip Stuck in Your Ear?
Earbud tips can come off in your ear canal. Here's how to handle this increasingly common problem.
What a way to ruin a Sunday afternoon. I popped in a pair of earbuds, highly rated by Consumer Reports for their sound quality. When it came time to remove them? The body of one earbud was in my hand. The foam ear tip? Still stuck in my ear—like, really stuck.
I’ve tried a lot of earbuds over the years, but this had never happened to me before. It turns out, however, that my predicament was far from rare.
"I sure am seeing a lot of these," says Dr. Robin Pappal, an otolaryngologist (ear, nose, and throat specialist) at Mass Eye and Ear, a specialty hospital in the Mass General Brigham health system. She says that the problem seems to be on the rise in recent years.
What to Do if an Earbud Tip Is Stuck in Your Ear
The first step is to not freak out.
The next step is to determine just how stuck the eartip is. If a good portion of the eartip is sitting outside of your ear canal, you can try to gently pluck it out with your finger.
If it requires a tool like a tweezer, you might want to remember Mom’s advice to never put anything in your ear that’s smaller than your elbow. Depending on where the eartip is lodged, you could be working just a few millimeters away from your eardrum, so even a tiny slip could result in a punctured eardrum. Pappal warns that you should be careful even when using your fingers since it’s easy to push an eartip in even deeper.
If you do need help removing the earbud tip, it’s not an emergency that requires a trip to the ER, Pappal says. While a stuck eartip may be bothersome, it’s unlikely to do any immediate harm, so if it takes several hours or even a full day to get an appointment at an urgent care clinic or your doctor’s office, you should be fine. After a couple of days, however, you would start running the risk of an ear infection.
If there’s some complication, like a small piece of the eartip lodged very deep in the ear canal, the urgent care staff might refer you to an ENT like Pappal, who can use a specialized microscope and more delicate instruments to remove it.
In my case, I quickly realized the foam tip was stuck in there pretty deep, and after a few calls, I got an appointment at nearby Skylands Urgent Care, which was open on Sunday. A 20-minute drive and 10 minutes spent in an exam room with a nurse practitioner named Aaron Siegel, who chose a long-nosed pair of alligator forceps from a variety of instruments, and I was on my way.
How to Prevent Stuck Eartips
Preventing this problem begins with careful earbud sizing and basic maintenance.
- Size them right. Make sure your eartips are sized properly. When choosing eartips, if you can get a good seal with more than one size (many brands including Apple and Sony have an eartip fit test in their apps), you should choose the larger ones, which won’t push as deeply into the ear canal as smaller ones. We test the fit of earbuds in our labs with testers with different size ear canals, and report the findings in detail in our ratings.
- Secure the tips to the earbud. Check that your eartips are pushed all the way onto the stems of your earbuds, and give them a little tug to make sure they’re secure.
- Inspect your eartips. Inspect the tips regularly to make sure they haven’t deteriorated. According to Siegel, damaged tips seem more prone to getting stuck, and can also shed pieces into your ear canal. He’s also seen enough repeat customers that he suggests that you immediately toss out any tips that have gotten stuck—it will tend to happen again.
- Twist your tips. Be mindful as you remove your ear tips. Twisting them slightly rather than pulling them straight out can help break the seal between the tip and your ear canal.
- Be careful when shopping for replacements. Third-party replacement ear tips can be a way to get a better fit in your ear. But before you start using them, make sure they also fit securely on the stem of the earbud.
- Ignore the earwax. When you pull out your earbuds and there’s some brown gunk on the white silicone, don’t be freaked out. "Earwax is your friend," says Pappal. She hasn’t seen any correlation between excess wax and stuck earbud tips, and a modest amount of wax is vital to good ear health. Avoid earwax removal kits—just wipe off the earbuds and play more tunes.
Clarification: The description of Mass Eye and Ear in this article, originally published Feb. 24, 2023, has been updated.
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