Snails being milked for slime to put in female beauty products in UK and US
SNAILS are being “milked” for their slime in Thailand so it can be included in beauty products sold in the UK and US.
Their slimy secretions are thought to stave off signs of ageing as well as giving skin a “glowing” quality.
As a result a raft of new snail farms have sprung up in the Far Eastern country as demand for the slippery shell-dwellers “mucin” rises.
Over the last three years, farmers and entrepreneurial locals have begun keeping the snails that were once regarded as a plague on the crops.
Snail slime has become worth more than gold with a snail mucin face mask costing upwards of £240.
Altogether the global slime industry is worth an estimated £251 million.
There are now more than 80 snail farms in the Thai province of Nakhon Nayok, two hours east of Bangkok.
Phatinisiri Thangkeaw, a teacher, said she had begun her business by buying snails from nearby rice farmers, who were glad to be rid of them because they wreak havoc on newly planted crops.
She pays local farmers around $1 for a kilogram of snails and now has more than 1,000 snails that she milks for their mucin and then sells.
She told the : “Farmers used to throw them on the road or in the rivers but now they sell them to me to earn extra money.”
The process of harvesting the slime is seen as humane, involving dripping water over the snails to encourage them to secrete the mucin, which does not kill or harm them.
To keep the quality high, in Thailand the snails are fed vegetables and grains and are only milked once every three weeks.
In Thailand, the raw mucin is all flogged to one cosmetics company, Aden International, which was established after Kitpong Puttarathuvanun saw a gap in the market.
The businessman sells the slime both as an expensive serum and a dried powder.
It was in the 1980s that the potential of snail secretions were noticed by breeders in Chile, who marvelled at how soft their hands became after handling the slimy critters.
The first cream containing snail mucin was produced in Chile, but more recently it has boomed in the Korean and American beauty market.
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The mucin contains ingredients like glycoproteins, hyaluronic acid, and glycolic acid.
These chemicals are said to stimulate collagen, slowing the onset of wrinkles and healing acne and reducing scar tissue, though dermatologists are divided on the benefits.
Other bizarre beauty treatments to hit the headlines recently include creams made from circumcised foreskins and “vampire facials” which involve rubbing your own blood on your face.
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