How far are you willing to go for the sake of beauty and a wrinkle-free face? If you don't mind going to the extreme, then perhaps a snail facial is something you're willing to try.
In a personal account by Denis Gray, published by the Associated Press, he narrated his "interesting" encounter with the snails in a spa in Chiang Mai, Thailand. This country is one of the fastest-growing destinations in Asia, mainly because of its beaches and affordable health and wellness tourism. Cosmetic surgeries, for example, can cost a third of what you normally spend in the United States but without compromising output, provided you have chosen a very good doctor.
Gray, however, didn't get cosmetic surgery but a facial spa using the mucus of the snails.
Snail facial is actually a growing trend in the country, along with fish spa, where you dip your feet on fresh clean water with fish and let them eat away the dead skin cells.
In a snail spa, "cultured" snails are allowed to roam freely on your face while they secrete mucus believed to carry certain nutrients and antioxidants that can rejuvenate your skin, making it suppler, smoother, and younger looking.
Expectedly, these cultured snails are grown by a pair of Frenchmen, who also love to eat escargots (but not their own snails). When they started last year, they only had 100 of these slimy creatures imported from France. Now their number has ballooned to more than 25,000, all of them dining on a very healthy diet of organic carrots, aloe, and cabbage.
There are different packages available in the spa, but the author opted for Celebrity, which lasted for almost an hour but cost him only $30, a far cry from the $200 per nail spa in Japan, where the craze started sometime in 2013.