I use cotton buds to clean and dry my ears after a shower, but I DON’T go deep, just inside the ear orifice.
When the banning of cotton buds from sale in U.K. was first mooted a couple of years ago, I brought a large drum of them back from the U.S., where they’re sometimes called cotton swabs.
I don’t know whether she did it because she loved me or she was a raving masochist, but when I was a kid, 8, 9, or 10, my mother would lay my head in her lap and drip hair dye peroxide in my ears to remove any wax.
It didn’t hurt, but the roaring, rushing sound in my ears as the peroxide ate into the wax, frightened the life out of me, after maybe 60 seconds she’d turn my head over, and the dislodged liquid wax would drip out on to a dishcloth, which went straight into the trash can, eew!