Deep Look

Next Episode Sneak Peek - Face Mites!

Added 2019-05-18 00:29:19 +0000 UTC

Yep, you probably have Demodex mites living on your face. These tiny arachnids feast on sebum, the greasy oil in your pores. But should you be worried about your eight-legged guests?

They’re called Demodex. And pretty much every adult human alive has a population of these mites living on them.

Also called eyelash mites, they’re too small to see with the naked eye. They’re mostly transparent, and at about .3 millimeters long, it would take about five face adult mites laid end to end to stretch across the head of a pin.

“They look like kind of like stubby little worms,” said Michelle Trautwein, an entomologist at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

Trautwein studies our relationship with these microscopic stowaways by looking at their DNA. Her findings so far show that people in different parts of the world have different face mites living in the skin.

Face mites spend their days face-down inside your hair follicles nestled up against the hair shaft.

They eat sebum, that greasy oil your skin makes to protect itself and keep it from drying out. The sebum is produced in sebaceous glands, which empty into the hair follicles, coating both the hair shaft and face mites.

That’s why the greasiest parts of your body — like around the eyes, nose and mouth — likely harbor a higher concentration of mites than other areas.

They live about two weeks. They spend most of their time tucked inside our pores. But while we’re sleeping, they crawl out onto the surface of our skin to mate before crawling back into our pores to lay their eggs. Fun!

We hope you enjoy this first look at our newest episode. You can start sharing it with other science fans on Tuesday, May 21st from YouTube. Thanks!