Warning: once you know this, you can’t un-know it. But it is fascinating.

Fact:

Right now, your pores are home to tiny eight-legged creatures called Demodex mites. They're microscopic arachnids, too small to see, and they live inside your hair follicles, especially around your nose, cheeks, and eyelashes.

The mites are blind, but they still manage to find love—by using pheromones to locate each other in the dark. They crawl out of your pores at night to mate on the surface of your skin, then retreat back into the follicles before sunrise.

Each female mite can lay around 15–20 eggs inside a single follicle. Within a few days, those eggs hatch, and a new generation of mites begins feeding on your skin's natural oils.

They don’t have an anus, so all their waste builds up inside them—until they die and release it all at once. That’s when your immune system might finally notice they were there.

Why it’s cool:

Nearly all adults have these mites, and most of us live in peaceful coexistence with them. They’ve evolved alongside us, adapted to our skin, and are rarely harmful—just very... personal.

They're like invisible, oil-eating, love-seeking freeloaders. But they're yours.