Big Snail: A Visit to the World of Korean Skin Care

This week I went to the neighborhood of Myeongdong, the famous shopping mecca for Korean skin care products. Actually, I think one can buy anything there, but it is especially known for skin care shops. It’s an exciting and buzzing warren of tiny alleys packed with boutiques, shops, cafes, restaurants, beauty clinics, offices, spas, and more shops.

The wider lanes fill up with street food carts. People are posted at intersections with signs to promote things: the Cat Cafe down the alley; a very chic hair salon; Christianity.

Music wafts from everywhere. A man on the sidewalk prepares to sing, accompanying himself on a small keyboard. There is K-rap coming out of this clothing shop, and K-pop coming out of that one. There are bigger fashion stores on some corners with giant glass windows and decorative displays, and large outlet shops for buying popular snacks in bulk.

As the sun drops, the place goes electric, with signs in lights projected and spinning on the ground, and overhead canopies of lit colored bulbs that go down entire city blocks. There is neon everywhere. People shop way into the night here.

The crowds increase: young couples slow-walking with linked arms; bands of happy, noisy youth sharing street foods on sticks; entire families, with small children and grandparents, shopping for bulk snacks, clothes, and fresh produce, dragging rolling suitcases to pack their loot home.

And what am I doing here? I am stocking up on free Skin Care Facial Masks, of course.

My first visit to this neighborhood was last summer. What stood out to me then was that every 2 or 3 shops was a skin care emporium, inevitably a narrow but well-stocked boutique full of jars and tubes and shiny boxes, with each shelf and its lotions and potions brilliantly lit. 

And stationed at the entrance of each of these shops was a white-coated, smooth-skinned, perfectly made-up smiling saleswoman. And in her perfectly manicured hands was a stack of various cosmetic facial masks, in a range of bright, candy-colored packs.

For the uninitiated, these are the soft, oval, damp sheets, with eye, nostril, and mouth cut-outs, which you smooth over your face, and leave on for 20 or so minutes, so the ingredients can sink into your parched and dilapidated skin and achieve their soothing magic. Sometimes the mask cools. Others refresh. Some simultaneously cool and refresh.

If a potential customer approached a shop, she (inevitably, it was a she) was warmly welcomed. If the potential customer crossed the threshold of the establishment, she was handed a complimentary skin-care facial mask by the white-coated saleswoman.

On my first visit to one of these shops, with my silver hair shining brightly atop my head, and my late-middle-aged face on full display, I was handed two free facial masks.

I accepted them graciously, bowing and saying “Gamsa-hamnida!” which is “Thank you!” in Korean. I started to peruse the nearest well-lit shelves. The saleswoman immediately gestured that I should follow her deeper into the store, and guided me energetically to the brilliantly lit shelves with the most expensive prices in the entire store.

“Here!” she announced, with a grand wave of her arm. “For fine line, and wrinkle!”

She then pointed at me, and repeated, “For fine line, and wrinkle!”

I was starting to get the gist here. The level of concern for my external signs of maturity was seriously high.

She grabbed a bright purple tube from the shelf, took my right hand, and squoze a line of goop from the tube onto my skin, and immediately started to rub it in. She nodded energetically as she did this. “Younger!” she announced.

I nodded. There wasn’t much else I could do.

Except wonder what exactly she had just rubbed into me. The other purple tubes on the shelf had Korean writing, and no clues whatsoever as to their contents.

I managed to extract my hand, express my fulsome gratitude in the politest manner possible, and exit the shop. Two doors down, there was another skin care boutique. When I crossed the threshold of this one, I was handed three face masks. And was escorted immediately and with a noticeable degree of vigor to the expensive item section, “For fine line and wrinkle!” This time the saleswoman grabbed my left hand, and applied two different substances, squoze from tubes, cool and soothing and still completely mysterious in origin.

She looked at me as she massaged my hand, and announced, “For fine line!”

“Ah.” I replied. “And wrinkle?” She nodded, and continued to rub.

At the third shop (only one mask), I managed to ditch the assiduous attentions of the saleswoman long enough (a large group of younger Korean women entered together and required her presence) to ponder a different section of the boutique’s offerings for a while, and to possibly ascertain more information regarding the contents of some of its many products.

I was reasonably sure that I was now in the hand cream section. This is a considerably cheaper department, with tubes marked at 2000 and 4000 Korean won, compared to the “For fine line and wrinkle!” section, where items were ten and twenty times that much.

The hand cream tubes had pictures on them.

One had a blue fish. Of course! Fish Oil Hand Cream.

Another had a yellow bee. That would be a Honey and/or Beeswax Hand Cream.

One tube had an orange horse on it. I did a quick Google. Horse Fat! Wait, Horse Fat? Horse Fat Hand Cream. Apparently, Horse Fat is now a trending component of modern skin care.

It struck me that none of this is a new thing. I am sure, though I have no empirical evidence whatsoever, that we as an aging and eventually desiccating species, have always encountered gooey, soothing substances in the exercise of our quotidian existence, and we just decided then and there to try smearing some onto our skin to see if it felt nice.

So honey, oils, and fats I suppose make sense. And with the wonders of the skin care industry, these substances can be made to look and, most importantly, smell quite appealing.

Although Horse Fat still seems pretty weird.

I was now back in the sights of the eager saleswoman at the third skin care shop. She hastened over, and began applying schmears of each of the hand cream varieties onto my left arm: Fish, Bee, Horse, and something from a tube with something black on it. A shell? Shell Cream? No, a more specific type of shell.

A Snail!

Snail Cream?

By now she had applied hand creams up to my left elbow. With my right hand, I reached for a snail tube from the shelf to see if there were any more clues on the packaging, and managed to make out in the teensiest print in English, the words “Black Snail Mucus.”

A new ingredient had entered the fray.

After expressing my gratitude with bowing and smiles, I exited the shop, retreating down a side alley to see what enlightenment I could gain from the internet about Black Snail Mucus.

There was tons. Even the flippin’ Mayo Clinic has weighed in on the benefits of snail slime as an antioxidant substance which can “soften skin and prevent sagging.”

Black Snail Mucus is currently being lauded globally as an age-reversing miracle ingredient in a myriad of products. And the phenomenon began here, in South Korea! The heart of Black Snail Mucus Skin Care!

The global market for these products is now in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

There were no details online regarding how willingly the Snails contribute their constitutive Mucus ingredient to these products, but I had encountered many snails in my own garden when I lived in London for more than a decade, and I do know some things about the ways of snails.

Snails can’t help but produce trails of sticky, gluey mucus when they move. And move they do, from one of your prized dark-blue flowering lobelia plants to another, munching the entire time, before moving on to your beloved pink primroses, and having decimated those, over to the entire vegetable patch, before making a beeline to the poppies for dessert.

Snails, in addition to being goo-machines, are always hungry. Their favorite food is whatever you happen to have planted in your garden at that time. For this, I do have the evidence.

But I’d like to pause here and point out the complete absence of actual photographs of actual snails on this blog post. No actual snails, large or small. No slime trails whatsoever.

And yes, you are very welcome. Because friends don’t make other friends look at snail pictures.

There are plenty of images out there you can access on your own, should the need arise.

All I have to say here is that snails come in some very alarming sizes.

You can also rapidly locate material illustrating the various types of snails native to Korea, which makes me suspect that the Black Snail Mucus may actually be imported. Yikes. The world of international snail goo shipping.

So, at any rate, this week I returned to Myeongdong, because I decided it was time to stock up on Free Facial Masks. And I know where they are doling them out.

I might as well make these fine lines and wrinkles work for me.

Interestingly, all the shops were handing out the same face mask! There was no variety this time. In a very condensed amount of time spent visiting three different shops, I ended up with seven Free Facial Masks.

And every single one was a Snail Mucus Face Mask! No cooling Cucumber or relaxing Lavender Camomile. Just Snail Mucus Facial Masks, from every single skin care shop.

I very strongly suspect the influence of Big Snail here.

At one shop they gave me cooling under-eye patches to try, “For under-eye dark circle! And wrinkle!”

I have now embarked on a devoted daily regimen of using my Black Snail Mucus Face Masks and Anti-Dark-Circle Under-Eye Patches.

I am moisturizing, anti-oxidating, peptiding, elasticizing, and ardently fighting free radicals.

And by the time any of you see me again in person, I shall be 12.