How did I not know that people are using snail mucin on their skin?
I have SO many questions, from extraction methods to who on this garden grub green earth thought of this? Seriously, I want to know who looked at a cute little snail, plodding along, minding its business, and said, “OMG, would you look at that glowing complexion! I say there, Snail, your complexion is flawless, what’s your secret?”

I might imagine some famished ancestor noticing a bird chowing down on a snail and saying, “Move over, Bub!”and grabbing anything that didn’t kill the animal. Hunger can make otherwise unappealing comestibles seem doable. Go forward a millennia, add butter and garlic, and you’ve got a desirable protein, not merely something pragmatic.

So maybe someone noticed that cooks who prepared escargot had particularly lovely hands that looked youthful. In busy kitchens among cooks whose hands are subject to abrasions, nicks, and burns: that would be noticeable. But I’m just creating a scene born of my need to know how such an inconceivable item is now promoted as the beauty product of the year.

Having lived in a shell-less cave, I’ve been snail mucinless this entire lifetime and I am hurt to realized that not only have I been deprived, but people who I thought of as friends were withholding vital information that could have preserved my youthful glow. Instead, I’m another victim of physics- a shriveled hag, encased in a wrinkly skin bag. And why? Not because it is a side effect of the natural passage of time, but because no one cared enough to tell me that inside that shell-house that they carry on their backs, snails have wee, tiny labs where they’re turning what we previously thought of as their yukky secretions, into pure gold, extracted from desperate consumers under the spell of the multi-billion dollar marketing of an aesthetic illusion.

I can only hope that the snails have lawyered up and are being rewarded. That unlike others, they won’t become victims of their innate talents, exploited and discarded by another heartless human industry.

Perhaps slime really is ultimately the perfect product and metaphor for our age.

Update: “Stressed snails produce slime, however sometimes machines are designed to be kind of like a spa for snails, using a secret spray to pleasure them which also triggers them to secrete more slime. Then they are left in a dark room on top of mesh so that as they scoot around the slime drips through the mesh and can be collected in a tray below them.”

Thanks to Flaky Biscuits Press for the above information.
I’m glad to learn that they’re not killed for it, and if they’re being pleasured in the process, so much the better. I don’t want any stress or depression slime on my wrinkles😉 (Not sure that ejaculation slime is any less dubious, but it’s better, LOL.)