a 28-year - old male patient came to our hospital outpatient department with complaints of short hair ( 5 - 8 mm in length ) coming out from the left upper eyelid since childhood as reported by his parents . on close examination by the dermatologist and the physician , the ectopia cilia was located 7 mm superior - lateral to the left upper lid margin . the patient 's maternal grandfather ( since deceased ) had similar ectopia cilia on left upper eyelid as was reported by patient 's mother [ figure 2 ] . ectopia cilia with eleven hair lash bundles pedigree chart of ectopia cilia an out - patient surgical excision procedure under local anesthesia was done . an incision parallel to the lid margin was given and root of the tuft dissected . histological findings were suggestive of eccrine sweat glands with no features of apocrine glands and dermoid cyst seen as reported by the pathologist . after 3 month 's follow - up , no recurrence was detected . the presentations in published works falls in two distinct categories : cilia protruding from the anterior surface and cilia protruding from posterior surface of the tarsal plate . the anteriorly placed cilia are uniformly located on the lateral quarter of the upper eyelid and associated with the presence of apocrine sweat glands and are congenital in origin . dalgleish presented two cases - one of them had large apocrine sweat glands attached to the follicle . baghestani and banihashemi reported first case of ectopia cilia with pedigree analysis in a 14-year - old iranian boy with a positive history of the same anomaly in his paternal grandfather demonstrating evidence of an inherited genetic disorder . reported that only nine cases of ectopia cilia have been reported so far till 1991 . the differential diagnosis of ectopia cilia includes several eyelash abnormalities such as cilia incarnata , a condition in which an extra eyelash grows from a normal origin through the eyelid to the inner aspect of the tarsal conjunctiva or outward to the skin . wang et al . presented an unusual case of a dermoid cyst presenting with black hairs emerging from a sinus tract on the upper eyelid and mimicking the appearance of ectopic cilia . distichiasis and trichiasis are other conditions which also need to be differentiated from ectopia cilia . trichiasis is a condition in which cilia originates from a normal position on the eyelid turn inward due to entropion . the nearness of tuft to the tarsal plate , the texture and the direction of the cilia suggest that the origin of the ectopia cilia may probably be related to the eyelashes in our patient .