this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2025
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me_irl
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You. The dust is coming from you.
That is to say, a significant portion of dust is actually skin cells shed by humans.
And pets et. al.
Love our pets to death but four of them is going to generate some stuff
I have two and generate the equivalent of several new pets every week.
used to be. i think synthetic fibers have changed that alot
Microplastic in other words.
not necessarily. if you live on a delta or a river bank the soil is very fine. particularly in dry seasons, it travels far (more than sand) through air and comes through opening of a house. fine particles stay suspended in air for long. so even if you close the windows you will see dust depositing on surface, especially electrically charged ones.
I live near a volcano, and I'd say most of the "dust" in our home is actually very fine volcanic ash.
There's definitely some skin cells and pet dander in there. There's just no way that those things are a majority of what we sweep up every few days, because our collective mass cannot possibly be dwindling that quickly.
A quick search suggests that one square inch of skin has 19 million skin cells. At a rate of 1000 per hour, it would take 19,000 hours (791.6 days) for one person to shed enough cells to equal one square inch of skin. Two humans live in my household, so we'll say for us together it would take roughly a year.
I'm sweeping up multiple cubic inches of dust multiple times a week. If dust were "mostly" skin cells, we should only need to dust a little bit once a year.
I'm going to wrap myself in saran wrap
Same, but that's just my kink.
What you meant to say is “the dust is coming from inside the house!”
Sunshine
This has been debunked. Most of it does not come from a person.
I promise you most of the dust in my house is from me.
Because I work construction, and I often forget to dust off before entering.
Have you read your own linked article?
From the article you've linked:
A significant portion, yes, but not the majority of it. The majority of it comes from fabrics, or depending where you live and the air system you have, outside.
If you watch the full video that point is made clear.
Alright. I have only read the article. Might watch the video sometime later.
I fucking wish. Dust in the middle East is mostly sand particles
Sand is mostly shed human skin.
We here on Lemmy struggle with understanding sarcasm sometimes.
That's what the sarcasm flag is there for: "/s"
which you put at the end of the specific sarcastic expression.
Some people just have trouble understanding sarcasm. Be it, because the intended tone is not understood by the reader due to the mere text medium, or because someone has trouble understanding irony and sarcasm due to being neurodivergent.
For irony and jokes I use "/i" and "/j" respectively in a similar manner.
In the context here, I would have just written:
"Sand is mostly shed human skin. /j"
TBF, we’ve probably all met a lot of genuinely stupid people. Poe’s Law can strike anywhere, anytime.
More specifically foreskin
Or possibly the dry Arizona desert you live adjacent to. That may contribute.