Shut up brain, or I'll stab you with a Q-Tip

As I was reaching for a pair of Q-Tips in the morning, which I use to keep my ears clean, I was surprised to find a bonus new product from Unilever in my washroom. It seems they are beta-testing a new variant of Q-Tip or something. I thought I'd give it a whirl.

Normally I use a regular Q-Tip, as seen below. The standard Q-Tip has a paper handle with a cotton swab at both ends. This gives unparallelled ear-cleaning convenience. Each end gives you a tiny comfy pillow with which to banish excess ear wax. The new Q-Tip has one cotton-swab at one end and what I can only imagine is a precision ear wax scraper at the other end. I used one of each to compare.

The normal Q-Tip was quite good at cleaning my left ear. I used one end to clean around the outside of the ear canal and flipped the Q-Tip over to dig out the extra wax. The process was done in a few seconds.
I tried to repeat the process on my right ear with the beta Q-Tip but found the precision-scraper end to be very uncomfortable. It didn't do a very good job of cleaning ear wax at all and left my ear feeling sore. I had to get another Q-Tip to finish the wax cleanup.
Overall I rate these new Q-Tips at 1 out of 5 stars. The classic cotton end is as useful as ever but the new precision end just doesn't work well at all. My recommendation is to stick to your normal Q-Tips or other cotton swabs.