You have very small mites living on your face right now. There are hundreds to thousands of them. They're invisible to the naked eye, about 0.3 millimeters long (just to put that in perspective ...

a type of tiny eight-legged mite that resides in hair follicles and oil glands on our face, chest and neck. “If you’re unfamiliar, Demodex are little, tiny mites that live inside our hair ...

Right now. Yes, you. And at some point, maybe now, maybe in a few days, it's going to find a nice cozy pore in your skin, and lay a single, enormous egg. Meet the face mites. They're smaller than ...

This story appears in the February 2015 issue of National Geographic magazine. Currently two species of face mites are known; at least one of them appear to be present on all adult humans.

Meet Demodex, the face mite, a microscopic arachnid that lives on human skin. The pore is its humble abode and the waxy sebum we secrete is its meal of choice. It's hard to know for sure ...