What To Do When Your Pet Snake’s Shedding Skin

Is your pet snake shedding skin? If their eyes are bluish and their skin looks like old, peeling paint, then yes!

Although your snake probably doesn’t need you to pull off their old skin, you can do a few things to make the process easier for your scaly pal.

Why Do Snakes Shed Their Skin?

Throughout their lives, your pet snake sheds their skin to allow room for growth, remove old or injured areas, and ditch parasites.

Just like people, snakes shed dead skin cells to reveal new skin in a process called ecdysis. However, instead of shedding in microscopic particles every day like humans, snakes shed their entire skin at once.

How a Snake Sheds Skin

A snake should shed their skin all in one piece.

They rub their head against substrate, cork bark shelters, and anything else they can find to get the process started.

When finished, some snakes leave their shed skin draped elegantly around their enclosure, while others shove it into a corner.

Before a snake can begin shedding their skin, they must loosen their old skin, which makes their patterns dull and faded.

Your pet snake will also build up fluid between their old and new eye caps, called spectacles. The fluid separates old spectacles from the new, so they come off safely. However, it also makes their eyes look cloudy and bluish, which is why many pet snake parents say their snake is “in blue” when they’re getting ready to shed.

The snake shedding process takes anywhere from five to seven days to finish and should leave a complete skin piece, like slipping out of an old sock.

How Often Do Snakes Shed?

A healthy snake that eats regularly sheds between four and 12 times every year. Younger, faster growing snakes shed more often than their older counterparts, but all snakes must shed their old skin.

A snake’s skin and scales are formed from keratin—like our nails and hair. Keratin doesn’t stretch or grow like our skin. So, snakes evolved a unique way of discarding old skin cells: They form an entirely new skin underneath the old one. When it’s ready, they shed their skin.

Should I Pull Off My Snake Shed?

In general, no, you should not pull off your snake shed, for two reasons:

1. Pulling the skin off too early can injure the new skin underneath. A healthy snake in a normal shedding cycle does not need help. Imagine yourself with a sunburn—the old skin eventually comes off, but if you pull it off too early, it hurts.

2. Most snakes get nervous when they’re shedding. Their cloudy eyes cannot see as well as normal. Besides, many snakes don’t have the best vision, anyway. Your normally calm scaly pal may strike at anything that moves near their face, not out of aggression, but fear! Unless something goes wrong, your pet snake may want to be left alone until they finish shedding their skin.

The best way for you to help your snake shed their skin is by ensuring their enclosure’s humidity is on the higher side of normal for the species, and that they have a humid hide to hunker down in for a few days. Some pet parents add damp paper towels or sphagnum moss inside their snake’s humid hide.

You can also provide the following to help your snake shed their skin:

• Quality substrate appropriate to your pet’s species: Many snakes use the ground they slither across to help.

• Decorations with rough textures, but no sharp edges: Cork bark, vines, and other items are great.

• A large water bowl: Provide a water bowl big enough for your snake to completely coil up inside.

When pet snakes struggle to get out of their old skin, it’s called dysecydis, or stuck shed. Most often, you can help your scaly pal shed their skin with a few simple tips:

• For patchy stuck shed and even stuck spectacles, dampen (do NOT soak the fabric) a pillowcase or snake bag and place your snake inside and in a warm location. Give them 20–30 minutes to slither around inside, and your buddy should come out with shiny new skin.

• Get a bowl with enough warm water for your pet snake to submerge themselves, but make sure they can keep their head out of the water.

• For stuck spectacles (eye caps), see your veterinarian if the above does not remove the spectacle. Your veterinarian will apply a water-soluble gel to soften the spectacle and then they will use a damp sponge to gently rub across their eyes. For very stubborn retained spectacles your veterinarian might have to use a surgical tool to fully remove them.

As long as you take steps to keep your scaly pal’s habitat in tiptop shape, you may never have to help your pal out of their skin. But, if something’s wrong and you are worried, call your exotic veterinarian for help—especially if your snake’s spectacles are stuck and you don’t want to hurt them.