What is The Fleshy Part of Your Ear: Role & Purpose

The outside part of your ear that you see is called your pinna or auricle. It is the only part of your ear organ that you can see and its job is not actually to anchor your glasses or provide a place for decorative jewellery. It is one of the first parts of the ear that starts to grow at the early stages of development inside the womb.

The particular shape is all relevant in directing sound down towards your ear drum. The pinna is made up of tough cartillage covered by skin. The pinna is unique to the individual they are part of, similar to a finger print, your ear shape will not be quite the same as other peoples.

As you grow your ear also grows and is one of the parts of your body along with your nose that never stops.

Part of the pinna have its own individual name as you can see in the above diagram. Human beings ears are as unique as our own finger prints, however they each usually contain the named components of the pinna named above. This is because each of these components have a role to play in providing important resonant properties, particularly the high frequencies.

Such high frequencies are directed straight into the ear canal however other frequencies bounce of the different component parts of the pinna before heading into the ear canal causing a very slight delay before they enter the ear.

As the pinna has no bones however this does not mean that you can't damage this part of your outer ear.  Repeated trauma to the ear via contact sports or injuries can cause bruising and blood clots that disrupt the blood flow to the pinna causing the ear to swell and change shape. This is often called cauliflower ear (Please check out our trauma section to learn more about this) and occurs in sports like wrestling and rugby.

It is worth noting if you have an ear piercing that you are technically causing trauma to a part of your pinna. Depending on which part of your ear can take longer to heal.

Your ear lobe has much more blood vessels in comparison to the upper regions of the ear, this means piercings to the top of your ear will take much longer to heal. Ear piercing names often are named after the area of the pinna they are placed such as a helix, tragus or ear lobe piercing. 

A newly pierced ear is susceptible to infection . If you decide to get an ear piercing it is important to keep it clean and make sure your hands are clean before handling piercings.