I’m a particularly squeamish person. I’m easily put off by unsavoury smells and icky textures. I’ll squeal at the sight of a worm. A maggot. God forbid, an ugly slug. And yet, I have felt perfectly comfortable rubbing snail slime onto my face for the best part of the last three months. This thought dawns on me one Saturday, while I’m applying onto my bare skin the secretion that oozes from snail glands. Now I would never usually rub snail on my face. That would be ridiculous. But this has been packaged up in a sleek bottle, and a few hundred TikTok users have convinced me it’s worth having. It’s been promised to moisturise, promote collagen and improve my skin’s elasticity, so I’m game.
Although snail mucin in skincare is not a new concept, it is a star ingredient in one of countless products that have gone viral on TikTok over the past year or so. Other practices (some good, some terrible) made popular by the platform include dunking your face in ice water, contouring with sunscreen, DIY acid-based masks and slugging – that means coating your face with an occlusive, such as Vaseline, in a bid to seal in moisture. Appetite for skin-related content is huge – the #SkinTok hashtag has almost five billion views, while #skincare has been viewed 103 billion times. As interest in our skin and what we use on it has increased, so has the number of products being pushed by content creators, brands and even dermatologists.
