What Are You Acting So Dignified About?

Just about all humans have tiny mites (relatives of spiders and scorpions) living in the pores of our faces, feeding on the oil from our sebaceous glands (h/t Moneet).

Blauerauerhahn [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html), CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en), CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

So stop acting so dang dignified, because just like the rest of us, you have tiny arachnids living (and pooping) on your face.

If it helps, just think of how much worse everyone’s acne might be if these little dudes weren’t feeding on our sebaceous oil.

Also, mites are actually not that much like spiders or scorpions. They just all happen to have eight legs. The mites on our faces are much more closely related to the peacock mites of the genus Tuckerella, which are kinda cool-looking, in a terrifying sort of way:

By Christopher Pooley, USDA-ARS ([1][2] Source not available online.) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons


Photo credits: Blauerauerhahn [GFDL, CC BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons; Christopher Pooley, USDA-ARS ([1] [2] Source not available online.) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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