Snails Aren't Just Dinner — Smearing Them on Your Face Has Become a Great Business

Snail mucus products now carry consumers' hopes of staying forever young, and satisfy their taste for the strange at the same time.

Probably no country loves snails the way France does. The French eat more than 60,000 tons of them a year, by some counts — far more than French farms can supply, so the country imports from Greece, Turkey and elsewhere. Imports make up as much as 80% of French snail consumption.

Snails are rich enough in nutrients to have earned the name "the gold of meats," and they are a classic of French cooking. A three-Michelin-star restaurant in France that left snails off the menu would be unthinkable. They are not cheap, either: snail meat can go for US$50 a kilogram, and a small 50-gram tin of caviar made from snail eggs sells for more than US$100.

The appetite for snails has never faded. Italian snail products sell well too, from more than 4,000 farms that mainly supply Helix aspersa, the snail most common in French cooking. Coldiretti, the Italian farmers' association, estimates that live and processed snails together come to 44,000 tons a year, an industry worth US$230 million, and that snail farming in Italy has grown by more than 325% over the past 20 years.

One figure stands out: in the past 10 months, Italy's output of snail mucus rose 46% — and all of it goes onto people's faces.

Creams and serums containing snail mucus all claim the secretion stimulates collagen, smooths wrinkles and fades scars.

If you buy Korean cosmetics, you will have noticed how many of them contain snail mucus. Tony Moly, a Korean cosmetics giant, sells a 24K pure gold snail all-in-one repair mask. The Face Shop, a budget brand, has its Sseal snail essence repair cream. And touch in SOL, a makeup brand aimed at young women, has put snail mucus in a mascara, claiming it helps lengthen lashes.

Korean cosmetics, always good at manufacturing a trend, did much to make snail mucus popular. One of the earliest cases dates to 2010, when Missha — a brand owned by ABLE C&C, one of Korea's three big cosmetics groups — launched a deep-repair moisturizing snail cream said to contain 70% snail mucus extract, enough to soak dry skin cells through. To persuade shoppers of the product's quality, Missha added that its snails were raised on red ginseng, the famous Korean tonic root.

It's Skin, a well-known Korean dermo-cosmetics brand, put out snail mucus products at almost the same moment. Many beauty bloggers treat It's Skin as the originator of snail cream, and its snail eye cream and masks have never dropped off the recommendation lists. Around 2014, word spread on Weibo that It's Skin's collagen snail cream was good and cheap, and sales in China shot up — at the peak, one bottle every 6 seconds, 500,000 bottles a month.

Amore Pacific, Korea's biggest cosmetics group, has been quieter here. It does sell snail masks and the like, but it has put more of its effort into plant- and herb-based beauty products — Innisfree, for instance, which pulled out of China in 2004 and returned in 2012.

Korea's skincare tradition goes back a long way. Plenty of Korean women spend about an hour a day on their routine, which runs from 4 to 20 steps, each with its own product. Snail mucus is hardly the oddest thing in the cabinet; other unusual ingredients include donkey milk, bee venom and starfish extract.

These strange methods have travelled abroad through Korean television. Bloomberg once interviewed American buyers of Korean cosmetics, and one said that Korean stars in TV dramas had taught her about a number of Korean skincare brands, including odd new products containing snail mucus. American celebrities have vouched for snail beauty products too: Katie Holmes, the actress and Tom Cruise's ex-wife, has said publicly that she loves them.

Fashion magazines, books and beauty blogs have spread Korean cosmetics as well. Charlotte Cho, founder of Soko Glam, an online retailer devoted to Korean cosmetics, first made her name posting original writing about beauty products and food culture (the Klog), which later drew a good number of Korean brands onto her shopping site. Out of that material she wrote a slim skincare book, The Little Book of Skin Care: Korean Beauty Secrets for Healthy, Glowing Skin, which singles out the near-magical powers of snail mucus products: anti-aging, acne scars, deep hydration...

Soko Glam and Peach & Lily, another Korean-cosmetics e-commerce company also based in New York, were both founded by Korean American women. Standing in the United States while knowing Korean skincare culture from the inside, they pushed Korean beauty products overseas — and introduced snail products to many more Americans along the way.

Seventy percent of Soko Glam's customers are not Asian. Peach & Lily, for its part, teamed up with Macy's in 2015 to open its first store-within-a-store, in Flushing, Queens.

K-beauty has won over a good many Americans. Korea Customs Service figures show that exports of Korean cosmetics reached US$2.64 billion in 2015, against US$1 billion in 2012 and US$1.91 billion in 2014. The United States is now the third-biggest buyer, after mainland China and Hong Kong.

Putting snails in cosmetics and medicine is nothing new. Ancient Greek records describe snail mucus used to care for the skin or to treat ulcers and coughs; snails were often crushed into an ointment. Snail skincare products later appeared in South America, where farmers raising snails for export to France noticed that their own hands turned softer and smoother after handling them. From there the idea slowly spread.

Beyond products made from the mucus, Japan now has a live-snail facial. Ci:z.Labo, a Tokyo beauty salon opened in 2013, charges about US$200 for the treatment. The salon says it raises its own snails on organic vegetables — carrots, komatsuna, spinach and beets.

The session runs close to an hour. Live snails are set on the customer's freshly washed cheeks and forehead and allowed to wander where they like, secreting mucus as they go, while the beautician watches to keep them away from the mouth, nostrils and eyes. Massages and sheet masks follow, along with devices meant to help the skin absorb the snail "cream."

The salon's idea has a connection to Mount Fuji, which UNESCO added to its World Heritage list in 2013. Hikers poured in afterwards, and in summer many who had skimped on sun protection came away with badly damaged skin. The owner told The Telegraph that sunburn is a common complaint among hikers, and that snail mucus repairs UV-damaged skin very well.

The Japanese and Korean fashion for snail beauty products and services then blew south to Southeast Asia, where the sun is plentiful and hard on the skin. Some Thai sellers buy snail essences and creams off tourists stopping briefly in Korea and Japan and resell them at home. Snail masks sit on the shelves of Thai 7-Elevens, and billboards in Bangkok's crowded train stations carry Thai movie stars endorsing snail cream.

Locals have begun to smell the opportunity. Siam Snail is a Thai company built entirely on snail mucus beauty products. Its founder, a university professor who spent more than 30 years studying snail biology, started it in 2015 hoping to build a homegrown snail beauty brand. Against the big Japanese and Korean labels, the early days were hard: the company first supplied samples to spas and hotels around Bangkok before consumers began to notice it.

Siam Snail's biggest problem is the cost of production. Collecting snail mucus is heavy labor — a team of five working for an hour yields only about 20 liters. The company has since expanded its farm on the outskirts of Bangkok to 10,000 snails, producing 1 ton of mucus a day. Asked by The Wall Street Journal exactly how it does this, Siam Snail said it was a trade secret.

Startups like Siam Snail are still small, but Thai businesses like the odds for snail beauty at home. Thailand is famous worldwide as a spa destination, with some 4,000 foot-massage shops offering fish pedicures, which should make the market easier to enter.

Chiang Mai has a live-snail spa of its own, much like Japan's. In 2014 two Frenchmen imported 100 snails from France for the sole purpose of putting them on customers' faces; their certified organic farm now holds more than 30,000 snails, and the facial is priced more gently, at around US$30.

Snails have become a business the whole world is watching. Figures from Ireland's National Organic Training Skillnets (NOTS) put global snail output at about US$1.07 billion, with the French and Italian markets alone accounting for US$320 million.

Demand that large also pushes farmers to extract mucus faster.

The old way to hurry a snail along was to soak it in water dosed with salt, vinegar or other chemicals. To make the process kinder, an Italian snail farmers' association has built a machine called Muller One, which draws out the mucus with a special steam bath — a spa for snails. The association's workers feed the animals naturally, vegetables only, then use ozonated water to kill bacteria before collecting the mucus. The snails, it is said, come to no harm.

A snail is only as good as the place it grew up. The farmer decides how it is fed and how the mucus is taken, and no two farms do it the same way, which is why snail products vary so much in quality.

Plenty of cosmetics scientists accept that the products work: snail mucus is rich in biopolymers such as water-soluble polysaccharides and proteins, which contract as they dry and so tighten the skin, much as egg white does. But some dermatologists doubt the anti-aging and other claims, and point out that live-snail treatments are harder still to judge, since snails differ from one another and no general conclusion can be drawn about what they actually do.

Either way, snail cosmetics now sit alongside the best-selling products labeled "horse oil," "sheep placenta" and "spider silk": they carry consumers' hopes of staying forever young, and satisfy their taste for the strange at the same time.

Cover image from Getty Images