Ingestible beauty is no longer a trend: It’s here to stay. The link between diet and skin has long been respected, but these days, we’re interested not only in eating well, but in supplementing our diets with even more. With the proliferation and popularity of these supplement products, all the details about how, when, and why to use everything is so confusing, you might just go cross-eyed. Just try googling “collagen supplements,” or worse, “best collagen supplements” and you may run for the hills in confusion.
From collagen drinks to powder and capsules, there’s a sea of options to choose from. All of them claim to boost your skin’s natural anti-aging abilities, with some promising to support all-around beauty, prevent joint pain and build muscle or protein.
We all know we want collagen (because it’s disappearing at a rapid pace as we age), but how do we know these supplements work? How do you buy them? How do you read these labels? What do you need to know?
A Deep Dive Into Collagen
Collagen starts to break down in early adulthood, and then the quest to replace it begins. But the collagen we put on our faces and the collagen we consume is not human; it’s usually from animals, and most often from fish. People have shown an aversion to using cow, pig, or chicken-derived collagen, so you may often see a clarification on labels that the collagen is ‘marine,’ or fish-derived.
Technically, there are 28 types of collagen (defined and researched so far), but of the five most common, only three are used for topical or ingestible beauty products: Types I, II, and III (creative names, right?). This article by Stephen Daniels, “The Science of Nutricosmetics,” helps to clarify the types a bit: Type II is formed in cartilage (usually chicken) and Types I and III are formed in skin, tendon, scales and bones of all the above-mentioned animals.
Whatever the type, collagen is either kept in the whole protein form (unhydrolyzed)—which is, according to most studies, too large to be absorbed through the skin—or hydrolyzed, which means, loosely, the proteins are chopped up into smaller pieces. For that reason, most topical and ingestible collagens are hydrolyzed: They’re supposedly more easily digested and absorbed in this smaller form. Read more
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