EYELASH BUDDIES! Okay, stop reading now if you're squeamish.
I found this website by Worsley School.Net through the courtesy of the clever "diggers" at Digg.com. It's been quite popular at Digg; apparently a lot of people besides me---1333 last time I looked---were were intrigued by the chance to learn about the wee parasites that live in the pores of our faces.
I will admit that my first reaction was to go Ewwww. I don't think any of us likes to think that for billions of microscopic dudes, we're just the place where they happen to live. And I still don't like the thought of little critters burrowing down into my---or, for that matter, your---eyelash (and other) follicles. But, it seems, there's nothing to be done about it. "Face mites" are evidently a normal incident of having a face (though if you don't wash cosmetics off and so forth you WILL end up with too many of them and they'll be an irritation. or your lashes may fall out)
So anyway, I have them, you have them, the most glamorous people on the planet have them. Not much to be done about them, then.
I thought of my high school biology teacher, Mrs. Ferguson. She used to get so excited when we were looking at things under the microscope. "Aren't they cute?" she'd coo, when we were considering, say, paramecia, amoebae, blue-green algae, rotifers, or spirogyrae (sp?) . I was always intrigued by the thought of these tiny lives going about their about-to-be-tragically shortened lives, as oblivious to us as we are to any parallel or analogous presences that may be observing us from whatever dimension they inhabit.
So to these little critters, demodex folliculorum, the demodicid, we're equivalent to the earth mother , Gaea, that the Romans and others worshipped; mysteriously there, inexplicable, until along comes a flood of soapy water or astringent lotion or shaving cream and carries the little dudes off. If they proliferate too far and become a problem, we presumably take steps to get rid of them. I doubt most of us would be as patient with them as Mother Earth has been with us. .
Anyway: what are they like, these mites of ours? I think they're cute, at least if you look at them head-on. Head on, they resemble tiny parchment-colored walruses with really chubby, stumpy little flippers. Look, see? Look at its little face. "Are those its eyes?" Nick asked. "What does it need eyes for, if it spends all its time buried upside down in your follicles?" I have no idea what those little dots are for, but they look like eyes to me, so as far as I am concerned, that's what they are. Maybe they're light sensors.
From other angles, they might be considered unpleasantly vermiform, but I refuse to see it that way. There's something rather vulnerable about the bulk trailing behind those tiny legs. They remind me of microscopic dragons, the sort that would get itself called "The Loathly Worm, " even though it's just hungry and hunted. I HATED stories where dragons were killed from the time I first began reading about them, so maybe that's why I feel a certain cautious sympathy for these minute versions.
Anyway, they're quite harmless, according to the article. They're very clean creatures; they evidently don't produce digestive waste; hence there is no demodex-guano in your pores. Like snakes, they're scaly, not slimy; that's how they manage to stay put. Their bitty feet have bittier claws and they have needlelike teeth for eating skin that would otherwise go to waste.
I will admit that this photograph---three of them, well and truly dug into a follicle, made me feel a bit twitchy. You can see them next to the hair. And from the rear they look distinctly wormy. That one's a bit harder to be unbigoted about, you know?
But I don't care: I am going to come to terms with these little guys, since evidently there isn't any choice. But since I don't want them getting the wrong idea, I'm also going straight upstairs for a good scrub with my trusty bar of Cetaphil. Sorry, guys, but Mother Earth can put up with only so many of you.
Which, come to think of it, should give us all pause.
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