Nikken Kamisori, a Japanese company with a long experience of making razors and blades, claims to have created the ultimate ear hair tweezers.

Ear hygiene is very important in Japanese culture, which explains the existence of ear cleaning parlors where ear cleaning masters wield specialized tools like the mimikaki to remove just the right amount of ear wax. Considering the long-standing tradition of ear cleaning in Japan, it comes as no surprise that a Japanese company managed to invent what it calls the world’s best ear hair tweezers. Featuring a metal spring at the end, which helps catch hairs more efficiently, the innovative device has become a huge hit among middle-aged Japanese men who care about their ear cleanliness.

The development of the ultimate ear hair tweezers was triggered by the epiphany of a 40-something engineer at Nikken Kamisori who learned that many men in his age group are concerned about their ear hair. Checking his own ear hair, he realized that it had grown longer than he remembered so started thing about ways to remove it.

The old-fashioned tweezers was the only available solution, apart from trimmers, and the engineer found it lacking. First of all, ear hairs are “invisible”, you can’t see what you’re trying to grab and since regular trimmers have a very narrow contact surface, catching hairs is very tricky. So the bright minds at Nikken Kamisori decided to come up with something better.

Instead of the flat ends of the conventional tweezers, the ultimate tweezers feature a metallic spring with a square cross section that prevents buckling and increases the contact surface, allowing users to catch a lot more hairs in less time.

Development of the ultimate ear hair tweezers began in 2016, and took two years to complete, during which time Nikken Kamisori conducted surveys to test interest in such a product. It turned out that Japanese men in their 40s and 50s were looking for a better tool to remove ear hair, and when the tweezers hit the market in 2018, they became a commercial success.

According to a Nikken Kamisori spokesperson, the company has sold over 8,000 tweezers in the last two years, and it expects to reach the 10,000 mark in the very near future. A pair of ultimate ear hair tweezers currently costs 3,300 yen ($31) on Amazon Japan. No the cheapest tweezers in the world, but they’re not called ultimate for nothing…