Accept It — Mites Are Living on Your Brows and Lashes

Psst! Little critters are living on your lashes. Right. Now. (Photo: Getty Images)

Yes, it’s true … no matter how often you wash your face, there are creepy, crawling things living in your eyelashes and eyebrows.

The Daily Mail reported on a study published in the science journal PLoS ONE, which found that every adult who volunteered for this experiment tested positive for face mites (otherwise known as Demodex folliculorum).

So what exactly are face mites? They’re microscopic creatures that reside in our lashes, brows, and ears, as well as in the hairs that cover nipples and genitals, and they measure about one third of a millimeter or about 0.03937 inch.

“We are not born with Demodex mites, though there is evidence that we are colonized at a very young age by mites that we pick up from our parents,” Megan Thoemmes, co-author of the study and a PhD student in the Rob Dunn Lab at North Carolina State University, tells Yahoo Beauty.

Related: Kate Moss’s ‘Mommie Dearest’ Beauty Trick Is Pretty Extreme

She explains that while there is no current evidence pointing to people being allergic to these critters, the number of face mites varies from person to person, and their presence has been correlated with skin issues, including rosacea and certain types of acne. “However, the relationship between the mites and these skin conditions is still unclear,” notes Thoemmes.

As repulsive as all of this sounds, Thoemmes says this member of the spider family may actually serve a purpose. “We currently know so little that it is hard to say definitively whether they have a beneficial, neutral, or negative association with our bodies,” she says. “But there have been reports that face mites are eating the oils produced by our sebaceous glands — or the bacteria that live on our skin — so having them could actually be advantageous.”

Related: Why I Got My Eyebrows Tattooed on Permanently

So before your scratch yourself silly and scrub your skin raw, Thoemmes reassures us that there’s no reason to, well, bug out.

“It’s likely that you’ve lived nearly your entire life with these mites without ever knowing that they are hanging out on your face,” concludes Thoemmes. “Since we all have them, it seems improbable that they are causing any major problems for most of us. And what we do know is that there are trillions of organisms living on our bodies, from bacteria and fungi to the Demodex mites — and if we were to remove them all, we would be unable to survive.”

Read This Next: The Side Of Your Face That Will Always Look Older

Let’s keep in touch! Follow Yahoo Beauty on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.