Myths about swallowing spiders in your sleep were found to be untrue, but now new research has found that every single person has thousands of tiny mites crawling on their face.
Published in the journal PLOS One, researchers found that no matter what your hygiene, everybody has face mites living in their pores.
"Within our samples, 100 percent of people over 18 years of age appear to host at least one Demodex species, suggesting that Demodex mites may be universal associates of adult humans," says lead study author Megan Thoemmes of the Department of Biological Sciences and W.M. Keck Center for Behavioral Biology at the North Carolina State University.
The mites are harmless and they live in our hair follicles and crawl around our face to mate and lay eggs. The two types of mites are Demodex folliclorum and Demodex brevis.
Demodex brevis microscopic mites are short and round and live inside the oil glands. The Demodex folliclorum are the creepy crawlers that live in the shallow section of hair follicles. They occasionally stroll around your face in search of other mites to procreate with.
Study participants have had their faces examined and scraped by researchers for the study at North Carolina State University's Dunn lab. The researchers "expressed sebum from follicles" as if they were squeezing a zit and scraped the face with mineral oil and a spatula.
The researchers found that 100 percent of adult DNA and 70 percent of young adult DNA had the mites on their face.
The harmless mites mate on your face, but do not leave waste behind. After they die, their DNA and waste is absorbed in the oily layer of the skin, which keeps your epidermis moisturized.
One theory regarding how these mites started living on our faces is that they are passed on from mother to child when breastfeeding.
"We want to know if Demodex DNA can provide a reflection of our own evolutionary history by allowing us to retrace those ancient paths of human migration," says study researcher Michelle Trautwein of the California Academy of Sciences. "So far, our analyses look promising. When looking at the DNA from one of our mite species, D. brevis, we found that mites from China are genetically distinct from mites from the Americas."
While you may feel the urge to go wash your face, take comfort from the fact that these mites have been living with us for a very long time.
