WHY USE A SNAIL SLIME EXTRACT AND NOT RAW SLIME?
The direct incorporation of raw mucus, as you can see in the photo, into a cosmetic product is simply unfeasible.
Indeed, mucus is a substance halfway between liquid and solid, with a soft and elastic consistency. It is a hydrogel with a water content between 92 and 99%. However, the water is trapped in a three-dimensional molecular structure, making it viscous and preventing its flow.
Therefore, a very sticky and viscous raw mucus cannot be integrated directly into a cosmetic care product. It is a real mucus, with a high viscosity which guarantees its high content of proteins of interest. It must undergo a cold extraction step under low pressure to isolate the useful compounds which are all strongly bound in the raw state.
In helicotherapy, everything depends on the harvest!
The benefits of Helicotherapy depend on the quality of the snail's mucus, which in turn is directly linked to the well-being of this animal. For Patrice Lambert, our snail farmer based in Albon in the Drôme, patience is the key word when it comes to snail farming. More than any other animal, the snail requires time to flourish and develop.
Patrice has therefore developed a breeding method unique in the world that makes all the difference:
1. Organic farming : In 2007, Patrice became the first snail farmer with the Organic Farming label in France. The whole breeding process takes place in Albon , in an exceptional environment located between the Drôme and the Ardèche. No step is outsourced.
2. Respect for the snail's life cycle : Mucus is harvested on the breeding site just after the snail has been laid, a period when the mucus is richest. The snail farmer follows his instinct and intuition, taking into account the behavior of the snail, the moment and the environment (temperature, humidity, moon phases, etc.).
3. A 100% manual harvest : This step requires great dexterity. Each snail is handled individually to avoid stressing it. This manual harvesting process guarantees the well-being of the animal. Each snail produces on average 3 to 5 grams of mucus.
4. Stabilization of the mucus : The mucus is treated at low cold pressure, allowing filtration without emulsion or oxidation of the product. This ancestral filtration system, used to obtain the most qualitative plant extracts, preserves the water- and fat-soluble elements of the mucus.
5. Incorporating the active ingredient into the cream : Mademoiselle Agathe has made it her mission to incorporate as many active ingredients as possible into her formulas. After having produced an exceptional extract, it is used to the maximum in our preparations.
The 2 main reasons for manual harvesting
1 – Animal welfare
When collecting, some snails may not want to give their mucus. In these cases, it is possible to leave them alone, and in addition, the pressure exerted on the animal is controlled and adjusted by the human in real time. In agriculture, whether viticulture or arboriculture, traditional manual harvesting promotes the quality of production, including great wines or delicate grape varieties such as Pinot Noir, which has a very thin skin. We therefore believe that our snails deserve at least as much attention as a grape. Harvesting the mucus consists of stimulating the snail's foot for about thirty seconds and this only once a year. Afterwards our snails return to their shady parks where they resume their lives as large breeders, and will therefore not be eaten.
See the harvest in video
2 – The quality of the mucus
The second reason is related to the quality of the collected mucus. Because as often in nature, the more you pay attention to the animal, the more it gives you is of good quality. With our 100% manual harvest, we manage to obtain an extremely dense mucus with a saturation of binding proteins, which makes it as rich as possible in proteins of interest - which are precisely the ones that interest us. Thanks to our manual harvest, we obtain a viscous mucus more than 200 times higher than mechanically harvested mucus, and an elasticity rate more than 10,000 times higher. This demonstrates that not only do we have at least 4 times more protein in our hand-harvested mucus, but also that the quality of the proteins present is higher, forming a more structured network, unlike industrial mucus.
Only the dexterity of the hand can harvest this mucus
Our manual harvesting method is directly opposed to certain mechanical techniques which claim to obtain "fresh" or "pure" or even "100% organic filtered pure fresh snail slime". Indeed, this implies that industrial machines are used to stimulate the snails.
Extract the proteins of interest
In this raw mucus that we collect by hand, all the proteins, peptides, vitamins, and other secondary metabolites are very strongly bound together. The purpose of the extract is to reduce the level of bacteria naturally present in the drool without damaging its organoleptic qualities. Cold extraction involves the use of a solvent to solubilize all the molecules present in the mucus. This is a crucial step because it not only extracts the active substances from the snail slime, but also concentrates them. For example, polyphenols, popular antioxidants in grape seeds, are obtained by extraction and not by direct incorporation of the seeds into the cosmetic.
Extract analysis
In 2018, we entrusted the Natural History Museum of Paris and the University of Normandy in 2019 with a series of scientific analyzes using chromatography and mass spectrometry. The objective of this research was to highlight the presence of proteins and peptides in the snail mucus that we collect manually and that we process by cold extraction at low pressure. We have successfully demonstrated that our extraction method is effective in maintaining the quality and volume of the proteomic assets present. Hemocyanin, actin and tubulin are the main proteins found. A hundred other proteins have been identified. Bibliographic research on the role of these identified proteins shows that they all have a relationship with the skin, its immune system or its collagens.
Maximum slime for maximum efficiency
Helicitherapy offers a complete range of cosmetic care products, highly enriched with snail mucus extract, in order to take advantage of all its benefits for the skin. We incorporate the maximum amount of snail mucus extract into our proprietary formulas. Our approach to Helicotherapy is to maximize the benefits of the proteins present in snail mucus for the skin. We achieve this by combining our mucus extract with organic plants, sourced from Pays de la Loire. It is this respectful symbiosis between animal and plant that makes our cosmetic products based on helicotherapy so effective.
