śluz (n.),
pronounced /ˈɕlus/
Derived from the Polish word for mucin, śluz transforms snail mucin—nature's soft-spoken salve—into a sleek shaving cream for your uniquely momentous shaving ritual. Drawing from traditional remedies & the golden age of French apothecaries & arcades as well as recent innovations in K-beauty, śluz blends snail mucin's time-honored healing with lab-grade innovation & precision. Sulfate-free, paraben-free, dye-free, & made in the USA with premium ingredients dialed in for sink or shower shaving, it hydrates, smooths, & delivers for the skin's natural barrier. It's heritage reimagined; grand-mère meets biomimetics; mutualism. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment in the bathroom mirror.
A shave so slick it feels like it should have existed all along. Obvious only in hindsight.
developed & designed by two PhDs with peer-reviewed publications, our product is lab-tested, context-informed, & made with a smarter shave in mind
sheer serendipity: a bachelor party in Marseille, no shaving cream, a bar of souvenir snail soap, & voilà
crafted with a care and attention that can only come in small batch DTC form, we believe beauty comes from working tirelessly to reveal the extraordinary, right there, in the ordinary
our ethos
Progress isn’t a straight line forward: it’s a spiral. Each turn revisits the past at a higher resolution.
In the Enlightenment-era salons of France, snail mucin was prized for its restorative powers. In the 1980s, it resurfaced in mainstream French cosmetics. More recently, it's been championed by K-beauty brands. Discovering snail mucin cosmetics in Maison Empereur, the oldest hardware store in France, felt like that history flashing up again, spiraling toward a higher resolution. A reminder that innovation often hides in plain sight, waiting to be rediscovered.
Our shaving cream emerges where ancient wisdom meets bleeding-edge science; where the empirical meets the interpretive; where the Fibonacci curl of a snail shell rhymes with the curve of a face or leg.
our beginnings
Śluz began as an experiment between two friends from opposite ends of academia, both driven to get to the bottom of the physical world—to uncover the foundations things are built on and, in turn, to build on them—and with a desire to bring more deliberate thought into things people use every day.
The result is a product grounded in the discipline of the lab and the curiosity of cultural study: a shaving cream for those who want more from their rituals, who want to trade in business-as-usual heritage brands for something that feels both new and much, much older. A move back that’s also a move forward.
"Nothing could be more beautiful than that deliberate and discreet advance." (Francis Ponge, "Snails")