I fell down a rabbit hole yesterday looking up cotton swabs, leading me to Q-Tips—and their original name:
A Baby Gay swab was practically different from the Q-Tip we know today. For one, each swab was made by hand. Workers wrapped cotton around a wood stick (usually one side) and moved on to the next one. After that, the cotton was sanitized in a small amount of boric acid. As an ad from 1927 brags, the “boric tipped” swabs were great for babies’ ears, noses, and nostrils.
Phil Edwards
The man behind Baby Gays was a Polish-American inventor named Leo Gerstenzang. Apparently, a woman named Mrs. Hazel Tietjen Forbis owned a patent for a “cotton tipped applicator” before Gerstenzang, and sold the product under the name Baby Nose-Gay. Then, in 1937, Gerstenzang and his wife bought everything from Mrs Forbis including the patent.1 So much for competition!