Cotton swab
It was Leo Gersternzang, a Polish naturalized American. After fighting in the US Army in World War I, he worked for the Red Cross in Europe. In 1922, upon returning to the United States, he founded a company specializing in the sale of baby items. Legend has it that, a year later, when he watched his wife clean their daughter’s ear with a cotton swab attached to a toothpick, Gersternzang had the idea of turning that improvisation into a commercial product. Plastic rods, more flexible and safer, were only introduced from 1963 – initially, they were made of wood. Its use for ear cleaning, however, is considered dangerous by doctors. “In addition to pushing the wax into a deeper region, causing pain and hearing loss, there is a risk of injuries, infections and even eardrum perforation.
Wax has a protective function and should not be removed, unless its excess causes hearing loss,” says otorhinolaryngologist Shirley Pignatari, from the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp). Finally, it is good to remember that the name “cotonete”, although incorporated into dictionaries for a long time, is a trademark registered in Brazil in 1956 by Johnson & Johnson. The same happened with the product in the English language: the Q-Tips brand ended up becoming the name for cotton-tipped swabs in general.
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