Your ears never stop growing and get bigger by about 0.22 millimeters every single year.

In 1995, a researcher named Dr. James Heathcote wanted to know if the old myth about big ears was true. He measured the ears of 206 patients in the United Kingdom who were between 30 and 93 years old. He discovered that ears grow an average of 0.22 millimeters every year. This might seem tiny, but it adds up to more than a centimeter over 50 years.The secret lies in what your ears are made of. Unlike your legs or arms, your outer ear is made of cartilage, which is a flexible tissue. It contains proteins called collagen and elastin that keep things firm and bouncy. As you get older, your body stops making as much of these proteins, and the ones you have start to break down.Gravity plays a huge role in this process too. It is constantly pulling down on your ears. Because the tissue is getting weaker and less elastic, it can't fight back against gravity as well as it used to. This causes the ear to sag and stretch downward.Other scientists have confirmed this cool fact. In 2007, researchers at the University of Milan used high-tech 3D scanners to look at the ears of over 2,000 people. They found that both the height and width of ears increase as people age. The earlobe usually stretches the most because it doesn't have any tough cartilage to help it keep its shape.