"Snail facial"
A Japanese beauty salon has developed a new skin treatment involving
slime discharge from live snails... The treatment involves a therapist placing snails directly onto
the faces of
reclining clients and allowing the molluscs to move at random, leaving
trails of
mucus slime in their wake.
The secreted snail mucus is key to the facial, as it reportedly contains a
beauty-boosting cocktail of proteins, antioxidants and hyaluronic acid, which
help skin retain moisture, reduce inflammation and remove dead skin.
This is not from The Onion; it's from The Telegraph, via Nothing to do with Arbroath.
From the look on that lady's face, I think I'll pass.
ReplyDeleteThere are beauty, radiance and anti-wrinkle creams currently based on snail mucus. So the question is, why does this salon use actual live snails? Having live snails crawl all over your face may put off potential clients, and even if taking snails and sticking them on people is cheaper than extracting slime to make cream, why do it, especially if there's a risk of salmonella?
ReplyDeleteThe answer may be that the results are actually better with live snails!
Why? Snails have interesting rasping tongues that gently scrape the surface off of the things they move over. This is one of the ways they find out what they're on/moving over - they taste little bits of it (they have terrible eyesight). What may be happening is more than just snail slime. It seems likely that some of the effect of the snail facial will be derived from the snails basically acting as exfoliators.
I know they have been selling commercially prepared snail mucus in South American countries for a long time. It is called 'Baba de Caracol'
ReplyDeleteIf that's what it takes to be beautiful, you can count me out!
ReplyDeletePenn & Teller did this on their show exposing flim-flam. Dunno if the idea existed before it, but the show was to show how easily many people are gullible by authority.
ReplyDelete