3 facts that make earplugs non-negotiable

The safe amount is 30 minutes

A club runs at about 97 decibels. At that level the recommended daily limit is 30 minutes, and a normal night is five hours. Noise adds up across the day, and about a quarter of people aged 12 to 34 already listen to headphones unsafely. The club is rarely your only dose.

Five times worse without plugs

Earplugs work, and someone proved it. Researchers took 51 people to a 100 decibel festival in Amsterdam and drew lots for who wore plugs. Four and a half hours later they tested everyone's hearing. 42% of ears without plugs came out measurably worse, against 8% with them. The plugs were the only difference.

You can't hear it happening

Your own ears are a bad judge of this. The CDC ran hearing tests on US adults aged 20 to 69 and also asked how good they thought their hearing was. Among the people who called theirs excellent or good, almost one in four had the dip in the test that loud noise leaves behind. Put the plugs in before anything sounds wrong.

The safe amount is 30 minutes. Five times worse without plugs. You can't hear it happening. Filtered earplugs cut evenly across frequencies, foam cuts the highs hardest, which is why foam sounds muffled.