The Ones Who Live on Your Face

Lean close to a mirror. You will not see them, but they are there: in the pores of your face, around your nose and lashes, live tiny eight-legged mites, distant cousins of spiders, called Demodex. Nearly every adult human carries them. Right now, on you.

They are not parasites in the ugly sense — they live quietly, eating the oil your skin makes, and they have ridden human faces for as long as there have been human faces, handed from parent to child in the first days of life. By day they burrow head-down in your pores. By night, in the dark, they creep out across your skin to mate, then crawl back before morning. You have never felt it. You never will.

These are not visitors. They are residents — a creature that lives nowhere on Earth except the human face, riding our species like a homeland.

And if animals can live on you unfelt — how much of "you" is really a crowd?