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Subscribe to RSSA Nepalese girl looks for snails, used for medicinal purpose, in a paddy field on the outskirts of Kathmandu, Nepal, Aug. 25.
Niranjan Shrestha / AP
Snail-slime at the forefront of beauty
Ilya Naymushin / Reuters
An employee gives a medical-cosmetic massage to a client using an African snail at a beauty salon in Russia's Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk March 23. The beauty salon is the only one in the region using the snails' method, which is believed to help in speeding up regeneration of the skin, eliminating wrinkles, scars and traces of burn marks, according to the owner Alyona Zlotnikova.
Ilya Naymushin / Reuters
An employee gives a medical-cosmetic massage to a client using African snails at a beauty salon in Russia's Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk March 23.
In July, TODAY reported on the trend of snail-slime and guts being used in the latest beauty products. Apparently, the slime contains nutrients beneficial to skin:
What’s so appetizing about slime? In 2006, Chilean farmers reportedly noticed visibly smoother skin after handling snails they were breeding for the French food market. Packed with glycolic acid and elastin, a snail’s secretion protects its own skin from cuts, bacteria, and powerful UV rays, making mother nature’s gooeyness a prime source for proteins that eliminate dead cells and regenerate skin.
It’s a treatment that that has been used as far back as ancient Greece: Hippocrates reportedly prescribed a mixture of sour milk and crushed snails for skin inflammations. These days, it’s marketed as an acne treatment, spot and scar remover, and burn healer. Read the full story.
It seems that this salon in Russia decided to cut out the middleman by placing the snails right onto their clients' faces!
Would you be willing to undergo this treatment if it guaranteed better skin? I don't think I could do it!
Inspector picks tiny snail off South American flowers imported for Valentine's Day
Joe Raedle / Getty Images
U.S. Customs and Border Protection agriculture specialists inspect flowers for any foreign pests or diseases at the UPS facility at Miami International Airport on Friday. As Valentine's Day approaches, the airport will see about 85 percent of all flowers imported into the United States. Most of the flowers come from South American growers.
Joe Raedle / Getty Images
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection agriculture specialists uses a magnifying glass to look at a snail that he found and placed in a bottle to identify later while inspecting flowers for any foreign pests or diseases at the UPS facility at Miami International Airport.
Joe Raedle / Getty Images
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection agriculture specialist holds a bottle containing a snail.
The requirement for imported roses to be bug-free encourages some South American growers to use pesticides heavily, some of which are known to be dangerous.