Bad shed, what to do? How to manually remove un-shed skin from a Vietnamese Blue Beauty snake.

After being in blue, your snake will eventually shed its skin. If everything goes well, you should end up with one piece of old skin going from the snake's nose to its tail.

If your snake has had a bad shed, you'll find scattered pieces of old skin in your terrarium. Make sure you're able to complete the puzzle; if not, keep reading! If it's had an awful shed, you'll notice this:

Can you see the wrinkles forming on The Fury's skin? Nasty. Her old skin was still adhered to her new one, and she hadn't been able to slither off of it. In some parts of her body, ragged pieces of skin were hanging:

After taking a close look to Furia's terrarium, I found this:

Obviously not enough skin to cover a 50cm snake, this was the ultimate evidence of a bad shed.

Un-shed skin has to be removed as it may impede a correct blood flow and even lead to necrosis. After a bad shed, quickly examine your snake in order to evaluate damages. You have to pay special attention to (i) retained eye caps, and (ii) retained tail skin. Every piece of old skin must come off, but eyes and tail are especially sensible. In some cases, a retained tail tip may cause the death of skin tissue and even tail loss.

You want to make sure that both spectacles have been correctly shed, so you need to look for this:

If you notice un-shed skin anywhere on your snake's body, there are a few measures you can take; ranged from lighter to harsher:

1º The towel method. Cover your snake with a towel and put light pressure with both of your hands while you let your snake slither its way out. If you find ragged pieces of skin in your towel, the measure is working. Consider repeating. 

Tip: this measure works well when the un-shed skin on your snake is still humid. If dry, skip to the next one!

2º Moisturizing with olive oil. If there is a stubborn piece of skin refusing to come off, you can apply olive oil (or any other oil) to the area with a cotton ball and let the skin get impregned by it. After some minutes, try to manually remove the old skin. If it doesn't come off, let it work by itself. Put the snake back in its terrarium and come back later to see if the skin has effectively been shed. If not, you can repeat or try with the methods listed below.

This method is not appropriate for a large un-shed piece of skin!

3º The humidity cure. Place your snake in a R.U.B. with a damp towel covering 100% of its floor. Leave your snake in there for several hours or overnight. Humidity will help the old skin to come off. If there's stubborn un-shed skin, you can then use the towel method above.

4º The warm bath. Put enough warm water to cover 2/3 of your snake's height in a R.U.B., as shown below, and let your snake bathe for 20 to 30 minutes. After that, try the towel method explained in no. 1.

Tip: you can also put a folded towel in the RUB floor; it will get extremely wet, but will likely help the old skin to come off easily and naturally as your snake wanders by. This works best if you put part of your snake's body between the tower folds (and pray it doesn't move too much).

5º The manual removal. After all other measures have been tried and failed, try to manually (and very gently) remove your snake's old skin. For this, the snake's skin MUST be moist, otherwise you will very likely hurt your snake.

The Fury is a feisty snake, but calmed down by herself when I attempted to manually remove her old skin. I can't say she was comfortable, but she made the process easy by not moving as she felt it was something good, I guess. Either way, it took me a good 30 minutes, so you might want to put some music on before you start ;)

Manual removal has no secrets. Just be careful not to hurt your snake by pulling up the skin too fast and don't forget any piece of skin, especially not the eye caps and tail tip. You can try to mimic ecdysis' natural process by rolling back the old skin, from the head to the tail.

I hope this proves useful! If you want to share your results or any technique that has not been listed in this post, please do in the comments section below or by email :) I would love to hear from you.

In the meantime, scale up!

M.