The ‘power’ of slime

Perhaps allowing a snail to roam around our skin could be the best spa treatment.

Kieran Corley of Bragan Skincare certainly believes so. In the hour or so he spends explaining his snail farm business to the Celt, he allows a snail to roam around his hands, leaving mucin, or snail slime, in its tracks.

When placing the snail back into the snail farm, Kieran rubs the residue around his hands. While some may not be as comfortable letting this impressive little creature free roam on their body, Bragan Skincare has bottled this experience and created a skincare product range for different skin types and conditions.

It’s soon hibernation time at his Scotstown snail farm. It’s windy on the hill top overlooking Bragan mountain where a polytunnel-like structure houses around one million snails. Kieran’s son Donal is working in the background bringing the snails inside before the weather gets too cold, but already there’s a nip in the air whipping through the tunnel. He’s not handpicking all of them, most are clinging on underneath wooden boards and mesh netting placed inside grass boxes, where you can slide them into crates for the winter. Although there are a few escapees.

Kieran picks up one snail whose shell is slightly lighter in colour compared to the rest of his home.

“He has broken his shell and used his own snail mucin, his own snail slime to fix it,” Kieran explains.

“That is the healing power that I am trying to grab from the slime.

“A snail will secrete slime for three reasons, the first one is to move, second one is to stick and the third one is to heal.”

The powers of mucin are not a modern discovery, as Kieran explains that the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, also known as the Father of Medicine, first documented them centuries ago.

“My granny would have always told me, if you’ve a wart, put a snail on it. It’s the same thing. Snail slime is actually full of things that you would have heard of like hyaluronic acid, glycolic acid, allantoin. There are about eight components to snail mucin and all of them are sitting right up at the top for skin.”

Their slime is also anti-bacterial as it protects them from the surfaces they travel over.

However, snails are “very picky” when it comes to their living conditions, and what they love most is a shower of rain as dusk falls.

“If they get that shower of rain they’ll put their head out and have a look but if they don’t they might not bother.”

If it’s too warm, cold, windy or dry, they’ll retreat back into their shell.

“They might only come out to eat once a fortnight. He can go into his shell and live for three years without eating. They are incredible.”

The Smithborough native feeds them special snail food which they eat using their 22,000 teeth. He imports the food from Greece, which is supplemented with calcium to keep their shells strong, meanwhile they are watered using treated water from the nearby Bragan mountain.

“In this tunnel I provide them with perfect conditions every day, so they get a shower of rain at night which makes them come out. They get an abundance of food which is laid out on the boards. They love old timber because it holds moisture and humidity and they love moisture and humidity.”

When harvesting time comes around, they take 20,000 snails at a time and place them inside a special machine hired from Italy. The snails are placed inside the machine which is filled with steam creating humid conditions. They then move the floor gently. The snails secrete slime to stick to the moving surface, which is mesh, allowing the slime to filter down to be collected. For each snail, Kieran gets one gram of mucin per harvest.

“Then we take them and put them back in the field, and we do that two times per year,” Kieran explains.

This takes place in June and August, and shortly afterwards they go into hibernation for winter. When Kieran is “confident” there will be no more frost, he will take them back out again.

“I’ll test the ground temperature and once the temperatures come above seven [degrees] then I will consider taking them back out,” he says, describing how he has made “mistakes” in the past.

The father of two got into snail farming in 2019, and had initially planned to sell snails for the food market before realising the healing properties they possess. After working with them for three months, he realised that old scars on his hands and arms, derived from car and motorbike accidents in “younger” days, had cleared. He got to researching and realised that snail mucin can repair skin and soothe irritation.

He now takes his family business, which includes his wife Marion, son and daughter Donal and Kerry, to craft fairs and shows across the country and sells his products online on their website, where many users of all ages have shared testimonials of how the creams have resolved dry and irritated skin, among other conditions.

The “biggest thrill” Kieran has ever gotten from the business came one day when he was walking down one of the streets in Monaghan Town, where one man came up to him and thanked him for curing his son’s skin condition.

“‘You don’t know what you have done for my son’,” he said.

“That’s the best thing that has ever come from the business,” Kieran concludes.