I Got Snail On My Eye (Again): A Look at COSRX Advanced Snail Peptide Eye Cream

Jude Chao loves the COSRX Advanced Snail 92 All In One Cream for her eyes. So when the brand released a snail cream specifically made for the eye area — the COSRX Advanced Snail Peptide Eye Cream — she was naturally intrigued. Will it be just as good or even better than her beloved All In One Cream? She puts it to the test.

Hello, and welcome back to another installment of my apparently ongoing series, “New Things COSRX Is Doing, and How I Feel About Them”! In today’s episode, we’ll be talking about a new addition to one of the brand’s classic lines: the Advanced Snail Peptide Eye Cream, the third entry to their Advanced Snail product line.

I’m no stranger to snail on my eyes. I’ve been loyally using COSRX Advanced Snail 92 All In One Cream as an eye cream for all of this year — I sang its praises as an eye cream on my blog back in February, and my feelings haven’t changed.

This inexpensive face cream ironed out my under-eyes to total smoothness and moisturizes the skin around my eyes just enough, without leaving any oily residue that could mess with my eye makeup or loosen my lash extensions. It comes in a hefty 100ml jar that lasts forever, even though I occasionally use it as allover face cream. In short, it’s exactly what my eye area needed.

But now COSRX has released an actual snail eye cream.

Possibly motivated by the people who commented on the brand’s announcement post by tagging me to see the product, COSRX reached out and sent me a bottle to try. I am trying it, because of course I’m trying it. It’s snail. Snail eye cream. From COSRX. One of my most beloved K-beauty brands.

I’ve been using the COSRX Advanced Snail Peptide Eye Cream on my left eye and the original COSRX Advanced Snail 92 All In One Cream on my right eye for two weeks now, and I have some thoughts. So let’s dig in.

Ingredients comparison: COSRX Advanced Snail 92 All In One Cream vs. COSRX Advanced Snail Peptide Eye Cream

I’ve always appreciated the relative simplicity of the Advanced Snail All In One Cream’s ingredients list. It’s 92% snail secretion filtrate, with just a smattering of other ingredients, primarily moisturizers and skin smoothers. The Advanced Snail Peptide Eye Cream contains 72% snail secretion filtrate (boo! Less snail!) and a longer and more complicated array of additional ingredients. Here are the lists, with their shared ingredients bolded:

COSRX Advanced Snail 92 All In One Cream ingredients: Snail secretion filtrate, betaine, caprylic/capric triglyceride, cetearyl olivate, sorbitan olivate, sodium hyaluronate, cetearyl alcohol, stearic acid, arginine, dimethicone, carbomer, panthenol, allantoin, sodium polyacrylate, xanthan gum, ethyl hexanediol, adenosine, phenoxyethanol

COSRX Advanced Snail Peptide Eye Cream ingredients: Snail secretion filtrate (72%), butylene glycol, glycerin, helianthus annuus (sunflower) seed oil, 1,2-hexanediol, niacinamide, water, palmitic acid, arginine, carbomer, stearic acid, betaine, cetearyl olivate, sorbitan olivate, sodium polyacrylate, allantoin, tocopheryl acetate, panthenol, hydroxyethyl acrylate/sodium acryloyldimethyl taurate copolymer, sodium hyaluronate, adenosine, xanthan gum, myristic acid, copper tripeptide-1, acetyl hexapeptide-8, palmitoyl pentapeptide-4, palmitoyl tripeptide-1, palmitoyl tetrapeptide-7

Among the new additions in the eye cream are sunflower seed oil, presumably for additional moisture; niacinamide to back up the new under-eye brightening claims; and, at the very end of the list, an array of peptides known for their anti-aging potential.

The original Advanced Snail 92 All In One Cream is quite lightweight, as face creams go. Many people notice that the skin around their eyes is drier than the rest of their faces, so adding some richness in the form of an oil makes sense (though it did make me nervous, since I can’t get oils on my lash extensions for fear of breaking down the adhesive that glues the extensions to my natural lashes).

As for the niacinamide, if it’s present in a large enough concentration, it may help lighten dark circles caused by skin pigmentation, but it won’t do anything for dark circles caused by anatomy or by thin skin that shows the blood vessels underneath. Without any insight into the concentration of the peptides near the end, I’m not holding my breath for any earth-shattering revelations there, either. I’ve used exactly one peptide product that wowed me — NIOD Copper Amino Isolate Serum 2:1 — and that one contains a clearly disclosed 2% of its star peptides.

Essentially, what I’m seeing in the Advanced Snail Peptide Eye Cream’s ingredients list is the potential for a more moisturizing product, with some extras included to bolster the usual eye cream claims of brightening and tightening.

Performance comparison

One of the more polarizing aspects of the Advanced Snail 92 All In One Cream is its consistency. The cream stretches and pulls into long strings as it’s dabbed out of the jar, its slimy consistency exactly what you’d expect from a cream that’s 92% purified snail slime. The Advanced Snail Peptide Eye Cream retains a little of that stringiness, but without the intensely slimy feel of the All In One Cream. It has a much more conventional light cream consistency to it.

Both products are unfragranced and don’t smell like anything at all. I’m not opposed to scent in face products, but I appreciate the lack of it in eye products. Fragrance can easily irritate the eyes, so skipping it is a smart move.

As I mentioned before, I’ve been using both products literally side by side, one on each eye, for the last two weeks. I use them day and night, and I take care to apply the same amount to each side. I don’t put anything else around my eye area besides a bit of sunscreen in the mornings, and I use the same sunscreen on each side.

Since my eye area is, to my own critical eye, as good as I can imagine it being at 39 years old, I’m not able to look for any really obvious improvements. I did figure that I could look for differences, however. If nothing else, I could also see whether the eye I use the new cream on might deteriorate compared to the one I continued to use the All In One Cream on.

What I found surprised me.

Despite the addition of sunflower seed oil, the Advanced Snail Peptide Eye Cream actually sinks in faster and feels lighter overall than the All In One Cream. It’s not causing any problems with my lash extensions, and it doesn’t make my eyelids feel oily at all, even at the end of a long day. In fact, the Advanced Snail Peptide Eye Cream feels more watery to me than the All In One Cream, which leaves more of an emollient film.

As far as “results” go, both of my eyes continue to look exactly the same. Ha. This suggests to me that, as I suspected all along, the snail mucin in the products is the ingredient doing the heavy lifting. As I wrote for Beautytap about a year ago, snail mucin shows a great deal of long-term promise for its effects on skin regeneration. In the short term, the emollient and humectant properties of snail mucin help skin look and feel smooth and hydrated.

Personally, I also find that snail slime helps ward off minor everyday irritation. My eyes can get red and itchy quickly under certain conditions. Both of these creams have so far prevented that from happening, even when those certain conditions (lots of dust or pollen in the air, for example) manifest.

Conclusions

I’m seeing no ill effects from swapping out the Advanced Snail 92 All In One Cream in favor of the Advanced Snail Peptide Eye Cream on my left eye, but neither am I seeing any noticeable improvements. I’ll happily use up the bottle of Advanced Snail Peptide Eye Cream that I have. After that, I’ll be going back to the Advanced Snail 92 All In One Cream. It’s four times bigger than the eye cream at a slightly lower cost, so the value proposition alone makes it a clear winner for me.

That doesn’t mean the All In One Cream will be the best choice for you, however. As I mentioned near the beginning of this review, I don’t have issues with dark circles or hyperpigmentation in my eye area, and I no longer seem to have issues with fine lines or crepiness, either. The extra ingredients in the Advanced Snail Peptide Eye Cream were added to address those, so if you’re looking for more eye-specific benefits on top of the general snail mucin benefits, the eye cream may indeed be the way to go.

As always, the final authority on which choice you make should be your skin. Are you mostly happy with your eye area and just looking for some non-greasy, protective moisture and smoothing action? The Advanced Snail 92 All In One Cream may be for you. But if that’s not enough and your goals for your eye area align with the ingredients in the Advanced Snail Peptide Eye Cream, the eye cream might be the way to go.

Plus, the eye cream’s bottle is far superior to the plain jar the All In One Cream comes in. I like being able to pump out exactly as much as I need without having to stick my finger or spatula into the product and often coming out with too much of it for my eyes.

Are you curious about COSRX Advanced Snail Peptide Eye Cream? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!