This is the question everyone eventually asks themselves. The answer is no. They live all over your body in the follicles of your hair.

But, the situation is much more complicated than that, and in fact there is a lot we don’t know about these mites. But, there is a scientist who may be willing to scrape some of the mites off your face in order to advance our knowledge … of something many people would probably not really want to know about.

We’re interested in studying the evolution and diversification of Demodex mites …we want to use the information encoded in Demodex DNA to map the mites’ “family tree” and see how closely that tracks our own human family tree.

Our first task was to physically collect the critters … Although previous research (based on human cadavers) suggests that all adults have them, most researchers have only been able to collect mites off of 15% of the people they sampled when gently expressing sebum from pores (much like what an aesthetician does during a facial).

Sure enough – after sampling 223 volunteers during public events …

Read the rest here, and see pictures of the mites and people getting their faces … sampled!

Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:

In Search of Sungudogo by Greg Laden, now in Kindle or Paperback
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