This is from today's AZ Republic:
Help! We recently watched the movie Shrek that had a scene where Shrek pulls wax out his ear and uses it to make a candle. Now my husband wants us all to save our ear wax so he can make a candle out it. Please tell him it won't work, that he can't do that.
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Now that's really disgusting. Where did you find this guy? And what is he? Like 9 years old or so? Next he'll probably want to build a model of the Statue of Liberty out of fingernail clippings or something like that.
Unfortunately for you, he probably could make a candle out of earwax, although it's going to take him a long time to store up that much wax. And how is he going to keep it from drying out before he's got enough for the candle? Maybe he'll lose interest and forget about it.
Earwax - technically known as cerumen - is, after all, wax, and candles are mostly made of one kind of waxy thing or another, such as paraffin.
Earwax is made up of desquamated keratinocytes (a fancy way of saying dead skin cells that have flaked off the lining of the ear canal), oils and wax secreted by the ceruminous glands in your ear canal. The wax itself is made up of a bunch of things that are hard to spell.
Its function is to trap any small foreign objects that might get in your ear canal and to keep your eardrum from drying out.
Anyway, all that waxy stuff probably would burn as a candle, so I can't help you by telling him it won't work. I hate to think what it might smell like, but I'm afraid he could do it. Sorry.