Featured Image Credit: Insider
Topics: Weird, News, Beauty, Animals, World News
Joe Harker
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.
However, you might want to give that label another check as you could be topically applying snail mucus onto yourself without even knowing it.
Take a look at the bizarre way the mucus is harvested from the snails if you can stomach it:
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It turns out that snail mucus gets put in all sorts of products and some even use it as a selling point.
The International Institute for Heliciculture is located in Cherasco, Italy, and is a massive snail farm which has developed their very own procedure for extracting the slime from snails for use in beauty products.
They developed a special machine to make the snails secrete their slime without killing them, with the snail farmers describing it as 'a little spa for snails'.
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.
One hour worth of snail spa acid treatments extracts about 118 ounces of slime, with that slime then going into being used by a wide range of beauty products.
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.