This is a round-up of the 7 weirdest beauty ingredients that companies have used to market their beauty products. They made me laugh so much I had to write an article on them so here it is.

Placenta: This sheet mask from Amazon contains placenta, although the question-and-answer and the reviews don’t make it clear WHAT mammal the placenta came from. My guess would be pig or cow, but since I don’t read Korean (I know, shocking) and anyway there’s no picture of the ingredients in Korean OR English, I really don’t know. Except that there is some sort of mammalian placenta in this mask and people are putting it on their faces anyway. This other one says its placenta comes from real horses. I imagine there are a lot of horses giving birth all the time in Korea. There is also a placenta leave-in treatment for bleached hair. So you can walk around all day with afterbirth on your head. Sexy.

Donkey milk. Like, milk. But specifically from donkeys. For when other milk just won’t do the job. This donkey milk skin gel mask claims to provide a rich source of vitamins and nutrients for the skin. It also contains an extract from young pears, because as we all know, it’s all downhill once pears start to age. It comes in a 10 pack, so that’s nice. There’s just one thing I don’t get. Why donkeys, specifically???

Bee venom: I already reviewed the Manuka Doctor Apinourish Restoring Night Cream which didn’t really do anything for my face. But there’s also bee venom masks and serums that are supposed to use bee venom to tighten and improve skin elasticity. Or, they may just give you the sensation of being covered in bees.

Gold: The concept of gold face masks is pretty well-established in the beauty world at this point, right? Okay, chemistry lesson. Gold is an unreactive substance. We can leave it in the ground for thousands of years, and when archaeologists find it, it’s completely undamaged by chemical processes of decay. It doesn’t interact with other elements. That’s why we value it and like to make gold jewelry (although a lot of the gold in mass-produced jewelry is mixed with other metals to water it down, so it will taint a little over time, for example 14 karat gold is only 58.5% pure gold) If you put it on your face, it won’t actually do anything. So whatever ingredient is REALLY working in these gold face masks, it’s not the gold. It’s some other active ingredient that probably sounds less luxurious if you name a product after it.

Snake venom: This tube of face mask from Amazon contains snake venom, although since there’s nearly 3000 species of snake in the world, you might not get the same results if you go to your local national park and piss off a king cobra then stick your face near it. There’s also an eye cream for people who always wondered how it would feel to be bitten by a snake in the eye.

Snail goo: Mizon Snail Repair Face Cream is the most popular version of this, but snail goo is available in a huge range of products including eyelash conditioners, face masks, hand creams and more. There’s even a range of snail bee products such as this face mask, with both bee venom and snail goo in them. Personally, I’ll give it a miss.

Red wine: In the Tony Moly I’m Real sheet mask collection, one of them is a red wine sheet mask which I’ve reviewed here. It’s full of antioxidants for cleansing pores. It didn’t make me drunk.

Which beauty ingredients do you think are super-weird? Have you tried any of them?