Back in 2006, a small study comprising of 16 people discovered a gene that could determine a person's ethnicity based on the consistency of their earwax. People of African and European ethnicity usually have the wet type, while those of Native American and East Asian ethnicity have the dry type.

What's even more interesting is that the scent of your earwax could also reveal a lot about yourself. While all 16 guys' earwax released a dozen of the same chemical compounds upon heating, the amounts and proportions of the different compounds differed between them.

Wet earwax were found to have greater amounts of 11 of the 12 compounds, which falls in line with previous studies' findings showing that the wet-wax gene is associated with greater body odor. So if your ear wax is sticky, you're more likely to also have B.O. Yuck.

But it's not all bad. A paper set to be published in the Journal of Chromatography B claims that earwax could help tell future scientists more about people's diets, environments and physiology.

[Popular Science]