Microprocessing

Your Dirty AirPods Are Grosser Than You Think

Here’s what lives on your grimy earbuds — and how to clean them

Illustration by Julian Glander

In Microprocessing, columnist Angela Lashbrook aims to improve your relationship with technology every week. Microprocessing goes deep on the little things that define your online life today, to give you a better tomorrow.

Take a good look at your earbuds. Is the mesh clogged with earwax? Is there a strip of dirt or lint lining the plastic seams? Maybe there’s even an oddly intense and dark dust clinging to the interior edges of your AirPods case.

If your earbuds are disgusting, know this first: no shame. This is an obscenely common issue, an element of high-tech hygiene that is, oddly, overlooked, given how ubiquitous buds have become since the introduction of the iPod in 2001. But these little hunks of plastic, mesh, and rubber collect particles of dust, lint, earwax, metal, dirt, and pollution, all of which is in turn infested with bacteria and even fungi, which we then insert into our ears, sometimes for hours at a time. You wouldn’t stick something so filthy up your nose, but somehow into the ear doesn’t seem quite as gross.

I received at least 50 images of people’s gunked-up earbuds, and while I…