I try not to be gross on this site, but if you are a man of about 30 or 40 years old you know that your body just gets weird as you age. If you have met a very old man you will see that the hair in their ear and nose area is often out of control. Generally speaking, products for grooming the nose and ear are badly made, annoyingly loud, and battery powered. The Golden Birdie by South Korean brand Royal is none of those things, which is why it is life changing to me.
Most nose and ear hair trimmers I have used have been battery powered and built like garbage. These things are usually anemic little wands that are way louder than they have any right to be and just take forever at the task of trimming your hairs. The noise is particularly an issue when it comes to your ears, because any motor noise placed directly there becomes borderline dangerous to your hearing. Your other option is plucking, and I can think of few parts of your body that are worse to pluck than your nose hair.
For a long time I had assumed the solution was more technology, like a quieter motor, but it turns out the opposite was true. The Royal Golden Birdie is a spartan and analog grooming device. It can be used one handed and is meant to be placed between your thumb and index finger. The tip is two interlocking crown shaped prongs that close in on each other when pressure is exerted on both sides. The only noise it makes is a charming metallic rustling sound, like a lower registered version of a barber using shears. It comes apart easily for cleaning; you simply loosen a screw on it and pull the interior layer out to be cleaned with the included brush, which also fits in the case.
Royal makes several models, including a premium one where the brush is stored inside the device, but that one requires using two hands to operate the device itself. I went with the Golden Birdie, which is like five dollars more than the twelve dollar base unit, but I can’t tell what the difference is aside from the golden one claiming to be hypoallergenic. None of these devices cost more than 22 dollars, which is how much money falls out of me like Sonic The Hedgehog every time I leave my house these days.
Unlike my nasty little Panasonic trimmer, the Golden Birdie just works. With 12 blades, nose and ear hairs just vanish after a handful of delightful little clicks. The Birdie is a joy to use in terms of both its exceeding simplicity and its tactile fidget toy feedback. It gives an otherwise unpleasant grooming task a mild ASMR atmosphere. The Birdie currently has about 11k largely positive reviews on Amazon, so I guess I’m not the only one who really likes this thing.
I have not put the Golden Birdie through the ringer for more than a few times, and I will concede that it might get shitty over time, but it’s an exceedingly simple device made entirely out of metal with few points of failure (like, say, a motor or battery), and even if it does fail me in the future it costs between a good sandwich and a very good sandwich to replace. That’s the joy when you find a simple solution to an age old problem – there’s just way fewer parts to screw up.
