Did you know that dust is made from… you?

Have you ever wondered why the things on your shelves get dusty even if your windows stay closed? That’s because a lot of dust comes from you!

Dust is a mixture of many different things, but one of the main ingredients in dust is human skin cells. Our skin is really important — it keeps good stuff like blood in and bad things like infections out, so our bodies have to keep it healthy. They do this by replacing old skin cells with new ones. You replace your skin cells every 35 days, but you usually don’t notice because you shed them one at a time. In fact, by the time you’re 20 years old, you will have replaced your skin 200 times!

You can see it for yourself if you hold your arm up in a ray of sunlight and rub it very quickly. See the cloud of dust that comes off? That’s made of your skin cells!

But dust isn’t just made of skin. It also contains things like pollen, molds, fungi, tiny bits of plants, shavings of metal that come off of hinges when you open a door, insect parts, fibres from the clothes you wear, any pollution that’s in the air, and many, many other things. It even contains the waste from dust mites – tiny creatures that feast on the dead skin cells that we shed.

Here’s something to try: if you have a microscope at home or at school, bring in a small piece of dust from inside your vacuum bag or from your dusting cloth and see what you can spot under the microscope. What you see just might surprise you!