Before working for Phonak, I worked in a clinic setting as an audiologist for over 18 years. During this time I saw the inside and outside of many different ears! I am sure that any audiologist who, like me, has had the privilege of testing newborn babies’ hearing, has marveled at their tiny perfectly formed ears.
However, as we grow older, we tend to view ears differently. Our eyes are often referred to as a thing of beauty, but I don’t think I have ever watched a movie where a character is staring at someone else’s ears and whispers “your ears are so beautiful!” But when you think about it, what our ears can do is pretty amazing. I think viewing our ears as precious and beautiful is long overdue. So how can we do this?
At work a few weeks ago, we were taking pictures of new hearing aids on peoples’ ears. We were using our smartphones or tablets for this and I suddenly made the connection that any picture taken of an ear and uploaded to social media websites should be called an earfie — in line with the ubiquitous selfie (Oxford Dictionaries word of the year 2013) and even the belfie, introduced to the world by Kim Kardashian when she posted a picture of her fabulous derrière online. I then found out that the word earfie had already been used for this very purpose, even though it’s not very popular (yet!)
Photo credit: from Instagram, click on photos to see who posted them!
I have already seen a fantastic variety of earfies on various sites, some with hearing aids, others with earrings and adornments. I think it is a great way of promoting how beautiful and unique our ears are.
So, why don’t we all take out our smartphones and start posting #earfies at every opportunity? Showcase your ears and raise their status. We may not be able to convince script writers to include romantic lines in films about ears, but you never know, “earfie” might just end up with its own definition in the Oxford dictionary. How cool would that be?
To lead by example, here is my earfie. I played around with different effects as I wanted to create an „arthouse“ feel to the picture. One thing I did find is that there is an art to taking an earfie. It is actually quite hard to take a good picture of your own ear. It took many attempts early this morning resulting in an ear covered in hair, or part of it obscured by my finger. In the end, I confess that I had to get someone else to take the picture. However, maybe you can come up with a working method to take earfies, and share the resulting pictures and your method online. I look forward to seeing the results.