Meet the face mites. They're smaller than a grain of sand, are a kind of arachnid, like spiders, and they feast on the oil and cells in your skin. Particularly on your oily nose, cheeks ...

But what about pore cleaning mites like Demodex folliculorum that spend their entire life living deep in our faces? At night, the 0.3mm long organisms leave the pores to find a new skin follicle ...

Most people on Earth are habitats for mites that spend the majority of their brief lives burrowed, head-first, in our hair follicles, primarily of the face. In fact, humans are the only habitat ...

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 ...

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.