At Last, English-Speakers Have a Chance to Smear Snail Slime on Their Skin!

Back in April of last year, I wrote about the Spanish infomercial for Karakol Kream. Karakol Kream is a skin care product made from snails. Throughout the infomercial, they show a computer-generated graphic of a snail. I thought the whole thing was a strange Latin American peculiarity, kind of like that guy on Univision who dresses up as a bee. I wrote, “Perhaps the snail has some kind of cultural significance in Latin culture that I don’t know about, because I can’t image that any English-language infomercial for skin care would ever show a picture of a snail (CGI or not)…”

Well it turns out my assessment was completely and utterly wrong! A skin care company called BioCutis has produced an English-language infomercial selling a snail “secretion” serum called BioSkinCare. And the BioSkinCare infomercial doesn’t show just some stylized computer graphic of a snail like the Spanish infomercial—they show lots of real photos of slimly, ugly snails crawling around in dirt.

I’m not sure if this thing has aired on broadcast TV yet, but the videos are available on YouTube:

You got to love the audio syncing and video quality. I thought I was watching Max Headroom for a while there.

But wait, there’s more. Here they assure us that no snails were harmed in the making of BioSkinCare!

Apparently this amazing discovery came about when a “snail farm in Chile noticed that their snail handlers had exceptionally smooth hands”—which I’m sure must have been a major blow to the machismo of the Chilean snail handlers.