Greenwich, CT -- There are people who are devoted to discontinued products -- and then there are the fanatics who can't live without their wooden stick Q-Tips.

These folks are so attached to their beloved implement that when Unilever took the product off the market two years ago, they overloaded the company's phone lines and e-mail boxes with requests to bring it back.

Marketing manager Stacie Bright says she personally received hundreds of messages from people who told her in excruciating detail how they used wooden Q-Tips -- ranging from moms cleaning out their kids' bloody cuts to car detailers wiping automotive nooks and crannies.

Bright says not one of them would take her suggestion of using a regular Q-Tip seriously, insisting only the wooden ones worked.

The real motivation to bring the product back came when a Unilever employee spotted an eBay auction where two boxes of wooden Q-Tips sold for $20 -- quite a hike from the $4.29 retail price.

The company recently relaunched the product on the website drugstore.com, but Bright says some sneaks are still trying to sell wooden Q-Tips on eBay for exorbitant prices.

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