Prepare to have your life ruined.
The University of Surrey has conducted a study highlighting the terrifying array of bacteria which collect on your phone each day. And the results are mind-bendingly awful.
In a series of new pictures, students at the university tested their phones for bacteria by placing them on agar plates - dishes with nutrients designed to encourage bacteria growth over three days.
This is what happened next:
Dear lord no.
The study seems to build on an earlier project in 2013 to showcase the same phenomenon. Or it's just the same study, shocking people once more because of how clearly hideous the results are.
Fortunately the study found "most of the bacteria were harmless, but it just shows the invisible life that can lurk on your phones everyday".
Dr Simon Park, Senior Lecturer in Molecular Biology, said in 2013:
“As part of a course called Practical and Biomedical Bacteriology, an undergraduate module that I run, I get the students to imprint their mobile phones onto bacteriological growth Petri dishes so that we might determine what they might carry. It’s unusual but very effective way of engaging our students with the often overlooked microbiology of everyday life”
“The ecological niche on the body for Staphylococcus aureus is the nostrils, so a furtive pick of the nose, and quick text after, and you end up with this pathogen on your smartphone."
Excuse us while we grab a napkin and spend a few weeks scrubbing our iPhone 6 so clean it ends up thinner than an iPhone 7.