14 DAY TRIAL // After a few experiments involving snails, Dutch designer Lieske Schreuder discovered that by feeding snails with colored paper she would get a vibrant-colored poop just perfect to build floor tiles with.
The interest in snails came after Lieske noticed that the pests in her garden were eating paper and cardboard. She wanted to see if eating colored paper would change anything in the snails' feces so she started doing a few tests. She purchased hundreds of slugs and built a farm with a laboratory to test her newly acquired passion.
After she fed them the different-color paper, she saw that the sluggards defecated in color because “[they] cannot take the color pigment of the paper into their bodies and that is the reason why the excrement is colored,” the designer told Dezeen Magazine.
The colored paper is not toxic for them, because it has the same cellular structure as the plants they usually eat, the only difference is that their excrement is red, yellow, green, blue or mixed colors. The designer then gathers the feces and puts them into a machine that grinds them and presses them into roughly textured surface.
“Walking outside, in the garden or on the streets, we are constantly walking on snail excrement,” Schreuder says. We usually don't notice them because of their small size and plain colors, so the tiles are actually not that different from what we walk on every day. The project combines biology with art, architecture and design in an unique exhibition called Biodesign.
Snails have been used even for facial treatments in Japan and UK. The mucus released has powerful anti-aging properties and the results in reducing face wrinkles are overwhelming. The special ones used in this kind of treatment are fed a unique diet consisting of fruit and vegetables for the best outcomes.