Unbelievable video shows how snail mucus is harvested for beauty products

If you're an avid user of beauty products you might have developed the habit of ignoring what goes into the things you're smearing all over your face.

Take a look at the bizarre way the mucus is harvested from the snails if you can stomach it:

It turns out that snail mucus gets put in all sorts of products and some even use it as a selling point.

The snails get cleaned with water and ozone to make sure they're not mixing any dirt in with their slime.

Once that's done the snails are sprayed with an acidic solution which the farmers claim doesn't harm them, but does get them to secrete their slime as a defence mechanism.

While the process normally kills them, this specialised 'snail spa' machine can extract loads of slime without the deaths of all the snails chucked inside for farming.

However, some people watching footage of the snails being farmed of their mucus voiced concerns over animal cruelty and wondered whether it was really the spa-like treatment the snail farms made it out to be.

Several people clearly not in the pocket of Big Snail wondered whether a process which involves spraying snails with acid until it triggers a defence mechanism was really as harmless as claimed.

It turns out that using snail slime to look good is something which has been done by humans for thousands of years, with recorded instances of ancient Romans and Greeks using them as a cosmetic.

That famous ancient medical practitioner Hippocrates found that snail mucus helped treat skin infections.

Then again, he also thought a crushed up snail and milk was an effective treatment for inflamed skin and how many doctors do you see these days prescribing that as a treatment?

Now, this shouldn't be taken as a signal to go outside and find and snails you can and then stick them to your face, so please don't do that.