Your Earbuds Are Nastier Than You Knew, But This $8 Kit Will Help

“Earbuds can get really gunky really quickly, with earwax and goo and all kinds of dust. When that happens, the gunk can actually stick to the speaker,” said Ahmed Ashour, an IT professional and educator who previously worked at Apple’s Genius Bar. “It will literally block certain frequencies from the sound in the headphone, so you will get a muffled sound, you’re going to lose a lot of bass, you will lose a lot of mid and lower tones and it might sound muddy.”

The antidote to dusty, earwax-clogged earbuds? Regular cleaning. “The real trick is to [clean your earbuds] consistently, to not let it build up an absolutely disgusting mess,” said Ashour. Otherwise, “Once earwax gets inside your AirPods [or other earbuds], there’s really not much a … technician can do.”

Based on Ashour’s guidelines and our readers’ and reviewers’ enthusiasm for it, we recommend this $8 earbud cleaning kit, which sports over 17,000 5-star reviews on Amazon. The kit includes a metal tip to efficiently clean nooks and crannies, a fine nylon brush to gently clean the swath of earbuds’ speakers and microphones, plus a dense cylindrical sponge to clean the speaker and the inside of the AirPods’ wireless charging case. The kit is super compact and portable, with its three parts fitting inside the kit’s pen design, so you can easily toss it into your bag and clean your buds wherever you are. It comes in black and white.

To best clean your earbuds, you should be mindful of the material you’re using; that’s why using a specialized cleaning kit can be especially useful. “It’s actually not great to use [paper] tissue, because tissues leave tiny little fibers on the surface of silicone,” Ashour told HuffPost. “If you’ve tried to clean anything rubber or silicone with a tissue, like a TV screen, you’ll notice that when you wipe it, there are all these little white fibers that are left, so that’s that’s the main reason why you don’t want to use tissue or toilet paper when you’re trying to clean electronics.”

Ashour recommended first using a brush, and then going in with the pointy metal tip. “Brushes are great because they have teeth, so they can grab stuff. Then you can use the pointy tip to pick up the last bits of earwax and gunk that didn’t get caught,” Ashour said. Just remember to do so gently: “You don’t want to be too rough when you scrub the mesh.”