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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.

Comments

  • 5 Responses to “At Last, English-Speakers Have a Chance to Smear Snail Slime on Their Skin!”

  • Funny thing is, Penn & Teller pitched almost this same exact thing as a bullshit experiment in the second episode of season one of Bullshit! back in 2003.

    They were dealing with alternative medicine and as their last non-scientific experiment, they had a guy in a lab coat tell people of this new treatment with snail mucus that would get rid of wrinkles and things like that. People actually bought into it and let the lab-coat-guy put real, live snails on their faces to apply the mucus directly.

    I’m betting someone saw that and decided to make a quick buck!

    Here is the episode, btw:

    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3568319677426222158&q=bullshit+alternative+medicine&ei=Q4gqSOCmJJTqqgOT6Nm7CQ&hl=en

    The experiment starts near the end, about 85% or 90% of the way through the show.

    Comment by Densha on May 13, 2008 at 11:40 pm

  • I guess that means I have a goldmine in my backyard right now! Time to get out the camcorder and start working on my infomercial.

    Comment by aimhire on May 16, 2008 at 11:37 am

  • Were is the phone number?

    Comment by Bianca on July 4, 2008 at 9:24 am

  • “pure snail serum” ??? Um… serum is the new slime? *laughs*

    Safe enough to use on babies and Octogenarians a like! Who the hell uses that word?

    *sigh*

    Comment by fidget on December 11, 2008 at 12:01 am

  • I guess I’m glad to hear the snails weren’t hurt, though.

    Comment by Canaduck on March 25, 2009 at 7:07 pm