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FREE STANDARD SHIPPING on U.S. orders $50+ and applicable* international orders $100+

Our Story

Skincare is one of those things you never really think deeply about. There’s skincare, and then there’s fancy skincare, right? Drugstore versus department store? What exactly goes into skincare?

Holy Snails started as a k-beauty skincare blog back in 2014. K-beauty took the world by storm with its multi-step routines and effective products. But what made the routine so special, and what made their products effective? What’s the difference between a $30 Korean cream versus a $30 American one? Did they have some mystical ingredient that was unavailable to the West? Some magical composition that was widely known to them, but unheard of by the biggest and most powerful names in beauty? The Holy Snails blog sought to discover those secrets and to understand the science behind all the magic (and marketing).

So what was the secret? Genies? Aliens? Not really. The Korean Beauty routine is based around multiple, light, hydrating layers, quality ingredients, and user consistency. Layers, good ingredients, regular usage. What an elegantly simple system, even if marketing tries to sell the idea that it has to be 7-steps or 10-steps or you have to pat the serums in a clockwise pattern or hop on one foot during application (or else???).

As a consumer, we were already layering on skincare every night. That’s 2/3 of the process. What about the final third? Reading an ingredients list only tells you a summary of the story. Cosmetic science research shows that some ingredients are incredibly effective for our common skincare concerns, but it also showed that the efficacy came with requirements. They had to be at a certain pH or concentration or coupled with other ingredients. In other words, they had to be formulated properly. How then can we, as consumers, know if we’re getting the right amount of something good?

Well. That’s where we come in, isn’t it?

Our first product was Shark Sauce. It doesn’t have sharks. 0% Sharks. It was named after Jude from Fifty Shades of Snail. That makes no sense, you say. You can’t even anagram that to spell “sharks”, you say. Well, that is because her handle on Reddit was Sharkus_Reincarnus, and it all started as nothing more than a fun, fantasy experiment: Why not start with what we want, which was 5% niacinamide and 3% n-acetylglucosamine, a combination that is backed by research to be effective in reducing hyperpigmentation, redness, and general signs of aging? That’s only 8%, why not, let’s make our dreams come true! Sea kelp bioferment,the star ingredient of one of the highest end products on the global market. Green tea, licorice root, hyaluronic acid, things that are considered hero ingredients on their own right in many other product lines. Boom, Shark Sauce was born. We don’t just recommend it rotely. We literally designed it to cover all your general bases.

So it turns out, building a product around ingredients that work and using them in the concentrations that they were meant for is actually a pretty good idea. Some people see results overnight, while others don’t notice much with even several months of use… until they look at older photos. 

This is how we buildallof our products. It all starts from a place of need. Not a need for a new Spring collection release, but what dowe need, as consumers and skincare enthusiasts? What would we like forour skin? Honey, pomegranate seeds, hydrolyzed silk proteins, Vitamin C. Dream ingredients and dream combinations, all easily attainable. Our products are all designed purposefully, from the inside out. We manufacture it ourselves, so we control every step of the process, making it easy to tweak and refine a recipe as we go. Because we make them weekly in microbatches, we can use precious ingredients with short shelf lives such as Ceramides or Borage Seed Oil while still being able to assure freshness and quality. Functional packaging allows our customers to get every last drop out of our products, and the bottles are light and easy to either reuse or recycle, reducing waste. 

We’re just a small indie skincare company. We can tout that we're minority owned, woman owned, American made, cruelty-free, research backed. We can say these things because they're true things, but we'd also like to think we're a little more than just the sum of our parts, because there's more to a product than just an ingredients list.

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