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Paris-Made Spiral Earplug Redesigns Hearing Protection After 50 Years of Foam
ReParis-Made Spiral Earplug Redesigns Hearing Protection After 50 Years of Foam
The Ears 360 Silence, a CE-certified soft silicone earplug from Paris, replaces canal-anchored foam with a retractable spiral that locks into the outer ear's helix, delivering up to 29 dB of attenuation and a flush, side-sleeping-friendly profile.
A Paris-designed earplug is challenging a half-century of foam-based hearing protection with a structural redesign that anchors in the outer ear rather than the canal. The Ears 360 Silence, a CE-certified soft silicone plug from designer Youcef Abdaoui, uses a retractable spiral that wraps into the pinna's helix — the curved ridge tracing the outer ear — to hold the plug flat and flush against the head.
The design abandons the familiar roll-and-insert ritual of foam earplugs, which have remained functionally unchanged since the 1970s. Instead of pressing into the ear canal and relying on friction, the Silence locks laterally through geometry, bearing almost no canal pressure. That is the reason the plug sits flush rather than protruding, a detail that matters most to side sleepers who have long tolerated pressure points from loop-style reusable plugs.
Measured attenuation reaches 24 dB SNR under EN 352-2:2020, with a peak of 29.9 dB in the frequency range where snoring and human voices sit. A Swim & Work Kit adds triple-flange tips that push attenuation to 29 dB, moving the product into worksite and industrial territory. The spiral body measures 18.44 mm by 15.49 mm, slim enough that nothing significant presses against a pillow.
Abdaoui, who runs a studio near Paris, began prototyping the Silence in 2024 with a bent wire and putty to test whether a helix-anchoring spiral could hold in an ear. Dozens of iterations followed. The finished product was named France's Product of the Year 2026, a consumer-elected honor rather than a jury award.
Ears 360 has shipped the Silence to more than 120,000 customers through its own store, more than 500 pharmacies, and B2B partners before going international. The plug is mass-produced and certified, with more than 14,000 units already in stock. Standard silicone tips come in three sizes — 9.9 mm, 11.9 mm, and 12.9 mm in diameter.
Company data puts concert approval at 91 percent and commute approval at 97 percent. An IPX7 waterproof rating keeps the spiral pool-ready alongside the kit's triple-flange seal. The design also targets waste: one Silence replaces hundreds of disposable foam earplugs, the body is built to last for years, and the silicone tips are replaceable rather than requiring the whole product to be discarded. Packaging is compact by design so each shipment travels as a slim letter rather than a parcel.
Pricing starts at €24, roughly $28, for a single unit with a carry case and all three tip sizes. A bundle pairing the Silence with the Swim & Work Kit is priced at €27, and a Duo Pack of two units at €39. Current colorways are Black and Pink, with Green planned as a future addition. Delivery is scheduled for November 2026. No specific warranty period is stated on the product page, though the replaceable-tip architecture gives buyers a practical path to longevity.
The ear itself is already a spiral. The outer rim of the pinna is anatomically called the helix, and deeper inside, the cochlea forms a full spiral chamber that converts sound pressure into neural signals. Nature returns to the spiral repeatedly because it distributes force without concentration points — the same structural logic behind a nautilus shell or the tight coil of a fern fiddlehead. The Silence works with that architecture: the spiral holds, not the tip.
