You Have Bugs on Your Face
DT-XVIII: And in your eyes and on your hair follicles and in your sweat glands
Your body is a host unto itself, an absolute onion of overlapping systems and microorganisms that perform in perfect concert to get you outta that bed and into the waking world each day—and some of those systems are made up of outside forces, and some of those outside forces are indeed microorganisms. Bugs, in fact.
Demodex is a species of mite related to the spider but much, much, much smaller: “roughly 0.3 millimeters long – around half the size of the side of a credit card,” according to this article by Alex Hughes. They look like transparent worms, but they have eight legs and a mouth, with bodies segmented in two.
They live in the holes in your face. They have scales for climbing your hair follicles. They eat your dead skin, drink your oil, and gobble up hormones.
No, really. Basically every human on earth has these mites. And not just like, five of em’ either, but millions. One type lives on your hair, another in your sweat glands.
When it comes to demodex category is face, face, face, and they absolutely love lashes, but they can be found just about anywhere on the body (albeit less so).
WebMD says there’s basically no way to get rid of them. They come out at night to feast on your flesh and return to their hiding spots before you wake. I’m reminded of the little fish that nibble on your toes at the spa, except these bugs are even smaller and they’re always nibbling.
I started googling demodex after Katya Zamolodchikova mentioned them on an episode of UNHhhh
Trillions of microbes are on the skin—and get this—we all have mites on our face. Every one of you. I want you to look to the left. I want you to look to the right. Every single person you just looked at has fucking mites on their face.
—Katya Zamolodchikova
I was fascinated and the more I learned the more I thought about the lives of the mites, the mites on my very skin. My face is a planet to them. “It would take several of them to cover a pinhead,” according to this Cleveland clinic article. A demodex looks upon my lashes and sees not human beauty or aesthetics—perhaps they see a feast. Maybe to them my lashes are like the grand canyon, the bastille, the aurora borealis, a wondrous facet of their daily lives.
And so my body must be the cosmos. And other bodies and the rest of the world must be a vast outer darkness to the common face mite.
Their lives are extremely short. They’re born from eggs laid on my hair follicles, they gorge on my excess residue and they expire in two weeks—but not before laying eggs of their own. Their bodies break down on my hair.
They are not parasites, but instead commensal organisms. “This means they derive food and shelter from their host, but don’t actually harm them – consider them friendly, helpful neighbors that you don’t want to get too close a look at,” Hughes writes.
After all, it’s not like I was using my dead skin. In general, the common demodex is harmless, only becoming too numerous if you’re immunocompromised. You can read about demodex gone wrong on the WebMD page.
But for now, just accept that it’s really true: “We are such stuff as dreams are made of,” the dreams of many thousands of mites, micro-inching along. Hungrily.