Ickypoopoo.
This delightful creature is a Demodex folliculorum, or demodicid and you are its preferred food. Don’t you feel special?
There are probably several hundred of them on you right this minute. That’s okay, go take a shower; the Internet will still be here when you get back.
Oh, and they lay their eggs in your eyelashes. Sweet, eh? But there is some good news:
The mite’s digestive system results in so little waste that the mite doesn’t even have an excretory opening. So although there may be mites in your eyelashes, there isn’t any mite poop! Thank goodness!
Oh yeah, now I feel a whole lot better. I wonder if it’s impractical to cover your entire face in those Bioré strips…I shall attempt it and report back. Also, guys, if your sales spike because of this link, kickbacks in the form of nose strips are gratefully accepted. Don’t suppose you’ve got any “Eyelash Strips” in the works, eh?
On the topic of these strips, I must say that the wee fuckers are quite addictive. There’s something primal about peeling them off and checking for scream-inducing plugs of nameless gunk that formerly resided in your face, now comprising a tiny little eggshell-coloured forest on the underside of this Germanic piece of engineering. Tis a lovely feeling, like picking a scab and watching it come away leaving behind an open wound and several sticky threads of mysterious, colourless and nameless gel. Yum!
But, however much we at the ol’ raincoaster blog adore aforesaid pore-raping strips, however much we hate abovementioned icky facecrawlers, and however tight with a buck we may also be, we would not go to the lengths these ladies have.
Unless we were really desperate, and when does that ever happen, eh? Don’t answer that.
Who’d have thought?
Elmer’s glue works just as well as Biore strips. Have you ever slathered the glue on your hands and watched it dry and then peeled it off? Spread a little glue on your acne-prone area and let it dry. Then, peel it off. It will “grab” every little particle of dirt and lift it away.
StephanieAnother Elmer’s Glue Proponent
This substitute peel-off mask idea comes from Looking Good Newsletter.
You know those strips you can buy to remove blackheads and dirt from your face? Yep, they’re not cheap. There is another way to achieve the same results and at a cost of pennies, or less. It’s Elmer’s Glue. You heard me, good old fashioned Elmer’s Glue that most of us grew up using for one thing or another.
Apply a layer of glue on your face, concentrating on the nose area if that is a problem area for you. Let it dry completely and peel off as you would with a peel-off mask. Rinse what residue doesn’t come off when peeling. Feel your skin. Pretty nice, huh? Follow with a toner if you like.
Elmer’s Glue disclaimer: When using Elmer’s Glue as a beauty treatment, one should make sure they are not allergic to the product. While I don’t know the statistics of “Elmer’s Glue allergy,” there is a chance that someone, somewhere, is allergic to the stuff. Also, I would like to add that when applying glue to your face, it is not advisable to apply glue anywhere near the eyes to prevent the possibly hazardous “Glued Eye Syndrome.” Likewise for the mouth area.
A
Oh, I can think of a few people I wouldn’t mind giving a “Mouth strip facial” to.
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raincoaster 
Hmn, so glad I popped by :-(
(Eew!)
I think I should get a cut of Loofah and Hibiclens sales as well, don’t you?
Oh God, there goes my stomach. Thanks, rc, thank you very much.
You’re welcome. Don’t you wish there were strips like this for your life? And you could just moisten your life, put the strip on it carefully, wait ten minutes and peel it off and all the crap in your life like exes and such would be there, attached by the head, wriggling and trying to escape, and then you just throw the whole thing away and it’s gone! That would so totally rock!
Oh goodness, yes indeed!
Yeah, just what I always wanted: a Smurf life.
£µ¢λ that. Without the scrapes and bruises of my life, would I have evolved into the slightly twisted pinnacle of dessert topping on the sundae of life on earth that is I?
RC–if you had that sort of a life you’d probably be in Stepford shaking martinis and vaccuming something.
Yeah, but at least I could afford gin.
I never said you wouldn’t have had them in the first place, just that they’d be taken away when you were done with them. How can you oppose that?
I’m an ex-Catholic, remember? Without the trauma of my formative years I wouldn’t know when I was having any fun at all.
You raise an interesting point though. I have often felt that the purpose of a hell would have to be that the people in a heaven got someone to compare their situation to, more or less. Is it possible to experience great joy without ever having experienced the opposite feelings?
If it were possible to raise a baby entirely absent of the trauma of misery, or its first feelings of abandonment, what would that child grow up to be?
You are just totally not getting this. Could you possibly be not getting this any more perfectly? I think not.
This is why those strips only have a market among chicks. The guys would sit around suffering from maudlin bouts of tristesse for the blackheads left behind.
You were talking about removing significant chunks of life experiences from one’s past. Those experiences make us what we are. Did I miss anything? Or have you been affording gin again?
No, that is exactly what we are NOT talking about. Slow down, take a deep breath and the next time you want to jump to a conclusion and give us your Oprah-ready answer, save it for Oprah.
I am talking about removing the unproductive, life-clogging residual crap left over from living one’s life. Nothing about “would I avoid the pain, the lessons learned…O! What would Thomas Moore do?!?!” Just taking all the soul dirt that is not helping you and is in fact holding you back and peeling it away and moving on. Drunk exes will never call you at three in the morning. Hell, drunk PARENTS never will, that would have been an improvement in my life. That time the big kid beat you up and everybody laughed: You’d be over it now, and he wouldn’t bring it up if you ran into him at the mall. The fact that you smoked for years will not cause you to get lung cancer in the future, now that you’ve quit. Not that these things wouldn’t have happened, or that you wouldn’t remember them happening, or that you wouldn’t have taken whatever life lessons there may have been out of them (although it strikes me that quite a lot, if not the majority, of these experiences are meaningless) but rather that you’d be over it now, it would NOT happen again, the herpes would go into spontaneous remission, and none of it will ever cause you to stop in the middle of mowing the lawn and think, “Well, shit.”
Are we getting this now?
Ah … clarity dawns. The freedom to do the crime without the time. Too deep to discuss here. Buy me a drink sometime and we’ll talk about it.
On second thought, I’ll get the drink and just tell them to stick it on your tab. Until your idea becomes law, I must still try to shield my liver from the carbon remover to which you remain so dedicated.
Dude, are you sitting down? I’m on the wagon. Came back from Ontario fat, have had a grand total of one Martini since I returned. My liver thinks my neck’s been severed or something.
And AS IF I can run a tab! Everyone here knows me too well.
Dear Jedermann
Amongst all this incomprehensible Human Introspection,
have any of you Home Pseudo pSapiens given any thought
about how the Demodex folliculorum feels
about becoming (as the Botswanans would express it) “late”,
consequent upon being molested by this …. Strip, thereby being constrained to lose interest in what Monsieur Metro claims is the Evolutionary Truth
Es macht man denken, nee
Das ist es, doch
[It makes yuh fink, uhh
This is it, init]
Your obedient but bemused servant etc
G E
Don’t be silly: it will LOVE it in the dump. It’s full of dead skin cells.
Something tells me that Metro is still not getting this. Some horrid and pointless moment from his past needs to bump into, and mortify, him in a very public space to no purpose. Then perhaps he’ll get it.
Sehr G. Eagle:
I think we need to begin work on a preservation site for D. Folliculorum. A suitable environment would presumably require endless yards of exposed skin. Some soothing music would also be good, and to feed the skin cell sources there would need to be catering arrangements to serve a complex soupy brew involving yeast, and perhaps hops.
Since the shelter-providers would require exercise and hygiene, I envision a complex network of raised diases, brass poles, and lucite bathtubs.
That’s assuming of course that Godspodin Brezhnev cannot be re-animated–his eyebrows were the D. Follicularum equivalent of a luscious old-growth forest.
And RC, if you’re on the wagon, it’s only ‘cos they found you passed out on a luggage cart.
Sottissimo voce
err …. Monsieur Metro … Your idea of a D. Folliculorum Nature Park has that certain brilliancy commonly associated with your Money-Spinning Ideen … but are you comnfident of getting Federal Funding – would the funding be more likely if it were combined with an Exploding-Whale disposal plant – wouldn’t this attract Greenpeace supporters like Mlle RegenCoaster ….
G E
Oh I’d be willing to donate a couple of bears to the cause, as long as I got a share of the profits. To share with the poor, you understand.
Years ago I saw a documentary about the things we cannot see living with us, or on us, whatever. And all these microscopic thingys were magnified so that all of them looked like scary horror film mutant monsters. Really, people don’t want to know, do they? And really, why should they if it takes a microscope to see these things? But at the time I remember it taking ages to forget what actually slept with me every night – ewww!
Those strips – man, they are gross. You mean the ones you put on your nose, right? Gaaa, when you take them off the gack that comes out of your pores also has some sort of root thing attached to it. I tried them a few times when I was in my twenties and you’re right, they can become addictive (out damn spot!).
As for wishing there were strips like this for one’s life – nah! Complaining and worrying are my two big-time hobbies … am even thinking of going professional.
Not at all: please join Metro in the corner. I didn’t say you couldn’t whine and worry. Gripe to your heart’s content. I mean, doesn’t everyone who uses these strips still complain about her pores anyway?
It resembles a west coast banana slug … in my eyelashes … EEEUUUU! pass the glue.
Would you like yours to be the extra-special Barbaro Spa edition of Elmer’s?