Balmoral 2025: Snail slime for skincare? Kieran explains

Snail farmer Kieran Corley, an exhibitor at the Balmoral Show, explains about his business

Transcript

00:00Could you please introduce yourself and tell us what it is you do?

00:03Sure. Hi everybody. My name's Ciarán Corley and I have a snail farm.

00:08I have one million snails on the farm and I harvest the snail slime to make skin care products,

00:14especially for people who suffer with eczema, psoriasis or dermatitis.

00:19Two and a half thousand years ago, they were using snail slime to combat these problems.

00:25A guy called Hippocrates, the guy who invented the Hippocratic Oath,

00:27he was the first one to document and to use snail slime in skin care because he didn't have a chemist on the farm.

00:36What got you into this snail farming?

00:38I started to farm my snails for meat, okay, but after three months of working with the snails,

00:44my arms had previously been covered with scars because I had, you know, motorbikes and I had a car accident.

00:50Different things, I had 50 years of life and after three months, all of my scarring had gone.

00:55And I went, oh, what has done this?

00:59Then came lockdown and I spent lockdown researching what was in snail mousen that was so good for skin.

01:06You've got hyaluronic acid, allantoin, collagen, glycolic acid.

01:11A snail heals his own skin, he heals his own shell if he cracks it, using the healing power of snail mousen.

01:17And how does one farm snails then?

01:21So I have a large, it's 16 metres long by 30 metres wide, it's like a tunnel, okay.

01:30It's covered by a netting to keep the birds away from the snails because snails will be a juicy treat for the birds, okay.

01:37I keep them protected around the outside with steel because vermin, a nice, would love to nibble on with the snails as well.

01:46And I feed them and I keep them watered because they love moisture, humidity, that's what they want.

01:51So I have sprinkler systems going, I have feeding bays going and they're fascinating to watch.

01:57So I have a lot of fun.