(VIDEO): See The Mites That Live On Your Face

It might give you the creepy-crawlies, but you almost certainly have tiny mites living in the pores of your face right now...READ FULL ARTICLE HERE>>>>

They’re known as Demodex or eyelash mites, and just about every adult human alive has a population living on them.

The mostly transparent critters are too small to see with the naked eye. At about 0.3 millimeters long, it would would take about five adult face mites laid end to end to stretch across the head of a pin.

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

Demodex face mites got their name from the Greek words for “fat” and “boring worm,” but they’re not really worms at all. They’re actually arachnids — related to ticks and, more distantly, to spiders.

Trautwein studies our relationship with these microscopic stowaways by looking at their DNA. Her findings suggest that people in different parts of the world have different face mites. “They tell a story of your own ancestry and also a story of more ancient human history and migration,” she says.

But before she could tell that story, she needed to find the mites.

“We use a little spoon and scrape it across the kind of greasier parts of someone’s face, which isn’t as bad as it sounds,” Trautwein says.

Once the samples have been collected, she takes them to the lab to look at the genetics.

Trautwein has tested more than 2,000 people, including tourists from all around the world that make their way to the California Academy of Sciences. And she’s found DNA evidence of face mites on every single one of them.

“No one is thrilled at the initial notion that they have arachnids on their face,” Trautwein says. “But people are often curious — even in their revulsion.”

But how could these creatures live on so many people and still go unnoticed?

Our skin is mostly covered by a thin layer of peach-fuzz called vellus hair, with a few notable exceptions such as the palms of our hands and feet. The shaft of each one of those tiny hairs grows out of its own follicle.

Face mites — Demodex folliculorum and Demodex brevis — spend their days facedown inside your hair follicles, nestled up against the hair shaft, where you can’t see them.

They eat sebum, the 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 and coat both the hair shaft and face mite.

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

The mites live for about two weeks. They spend most of their time tucked inside the pores, but while people sleep, they crawl out onto the skin’s surface to mate and then head back to lay their eggs.

Since they live inside your pores, you can’t scrub them off by washing. It’s basically impossible to get rid of all of your face mites.

So how does Trautwein find and study a particular mite? With glue.

“I actually put glue on a glass microscope slide and stick it onto a person’s forehead,” she says. “Then I slowly peel it off. I look under a microscope for mites that are stuck in the follicles that stick up from the thin layer of skin that got peeled off.”

“It can be pretty addictive and exciting,” she adds. “It’s sort of a meditative process of looking through this microforest of follicles and hairs and looking for just the right potential movement or shape.”

It seems our immune system is able to keep their numbers in check, but some people can experience problems with the mites.

“When you tell patients that they have face mites, first of all, they freak out,” says Kanade Shinkai, a dermatologist at the University of California, San Francisco.