9 Mind-Blowing Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About Yourself

You’ll soon know this stuff like the back of your hand.

You were born with blue eyes. That€™s a fact. No matter how much you contest with the matter your eyes are actually brown, hazel or grey - you were born with blue eyes. Your true colour (unless they€™re still blue) was revealed when a pigment called melanin became fully exposed to ultraviolet light. So there€™s one thing you didn€™t know about yourself before reading this.

Of course, there€™s some things we don€™t particularly want to know about ourselves; like the fact there€™s more bacteria in your mouth than there are people in the world. Oh, and most of that dust underneath your bed? That€™s your dead skin, and you shed 600,000 particles of it every hour.

From how we came to be, to what happens when we die, our bodies create some insanely complex chemical reactions. So many of these we take for granted - like ejaculating, for example - when you ejaculate, you€™re actually transferring 1500 terabytes of information. It€™s true, one single sperm contains 37.5MB of male DNA required to create a human child. Essentially, your penis has a higher bandwidth than any Internet connection that ever existed. Now that€™s impressive.

If those facts haven't got your grey matter in a twist already, read on for more bizarre goings-on in that crazy body of yours.

9. You Have Tiny Mites Living In Your Eyelashes

Yes, really. If that wasn€™t bad enough, they€™re having sex on your face.

What we€™re referring to here is the Demodex mite, part of the arachnid family, and they live in the hair follicles of humans. Though considered harmless, they have been said to play a part in rosacea - a common skin disease - by laying eggs in the pores of your face. Horrifying, right? Scientifically referred to as Demodex folliculitis and Demodex brevis, the mites are sausage-shaped and a third of a millimetre in length. They also feed on dead skin and oily deposits; so as well as your eyelashes, they can also be found anywhere there€™s hair: ear canals, nipples, forearms, penis€ even your bum.

Demodex frequently get jiggy in the rims of your hair follicles while you sleep. Once inseminated, the female buries into your follicle and lays her eggs. When an eyelash falls out, it€™s often due to more than one eyelash mite burying itself inside a single hair follicle. Someone pass the bleach.

So how do you know if you have them? It€™s quite easy actually - all you need is to pluck out an eyelash and look under a microscope. A study of 29 adults (18 and over) in North Carolina found that 90% carried mites, and that all adults over 18 carried them. If that€™s the case, we€™re just gonna plead ignorance.

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Human woman. Content Manager at What Culture. Lover of many "ologies", punk rock and cats. My god is Ilúvatar. Follow me on Twitter: @nina_cresswell