Collagen seems to be absolutely everywhere at the moment, from powders stirred into morning coffee and gummies eaten with breakfast to drinks, sachets and beautiful tubs promising plumper skin, stronger nails, thicker hair and fewer wrinkles, often with a growing list of other supposed benefits thrown in for good measure.
Somewhere along the way, we've also started talking about collagen as though it's something our bodies are failing to produce properly and we urgently need to do something about it. We're constantly being encouraged to boost our collagen, restore it, rebuild it and prevent its loss, and it reminded me of something I wrote about in my last blog: “food noise”. Until somebody gave all those thoughts about food a name, many of us probably weren't analysing them quite so closely, and I wonder whether we've done something similar with collagen.
It's certainly not a word I remember ever hearing my grandmothers or my mum use. They talked about moisturising their skin, eating well, getting enough sleep and generally looking after themselves, but I don't remember anyone worrying about their “collagen levels”. Yet here we are, talking about collagen as though it's something we've misplaced and urgently need to put back, and once we're repeatedly told that ours is “declining”, it's difficult not to start looking for the evidence in the mirror. Perhaps my face is sagging a little more, perhaps those lines are deeper, perhaps my skin isn't as plump as it used to be and, rather conveniently, once I've started worrying about all of that, there's a beautiful £45 tub waiting to help me fix it.
All of which made me wonder what collagen actually is, where the stuff inside those tubs comes from and, perhaps most importantly, do collagen supplements actually work? So naturally I disappeared down another one of my research rabbit holes. Perhaps make yourself a cuppa and get comfortable, because what I found wasn't quite as glamorous or scientific-sounding as the packaging might have us believe.
First, What Actually Is Collagen?
Collagen is a completely natural and incredibly important part of us. It's the most abundant protein in the human body and forms part of our skin, bones, tendons, cartilage and connective tissue, essentially providing some of the scaffolding that gives our tissues their structure and strength. Something that tends to get rather lost amongst all those messages telling us to boost and rebuild it, however, is that our bodies already know how to make collagen themselves.
We make it from amino acids, with nutrients including vitamin C playing an essential role in the process, and as we get older the amount and organisation of collagen in our skin naturally changes, contributing to wrinkles and changes in firmness. Rather than seeing that as another bodily failure we need to correct, perhaps we could recognise it for what it is: one of the completely normal biological processes involved in ageing.
Rather wonderfully, considering how glamorous the collagen industry has become, the word itself ultimately comes from the Greek kolla, meaning glue, which doesn't have quite the same ring to it as Collagen beauty super glow, but is perhaps a little closer to describing what collagen actually does.
Now for the Slightly Less Pretty Bit
Traditional collagen supplements are animal products, with bovine collagen coming from cattle, porcine collagen from pigs and marine collagen from fish. Commercial collagen can be produced using animal hides, skins, bones and connective tissues, while marine collagen commonly makes use of fish skin and scales, often using by-products from the fishing and food industries that might otherwise go to waste.
There is actually a reasonable sustainability argument here, because if an animal has already entered the food chain, using more of it rather than throwing those parts away could be considered less wasteful. My issue isn't really with where collagen comes from, because what somebody else chooses to eat is entirely up to them; I simply think we should know what we're buying and consuming so we can make that choice for ourselves.
While researching this, something suddenly brought back a memory of my grandmother. When I was little, I had a terrible habit of biting and peeling my nails, and she would give me a cube of jelly because she said it would help my nails grow. At the time, I obviously didn't question the science behind Grandma's medicinal jelly, usually pinched from the packet destined for one of her famous trifles, but all these years later it turns out there was actually a connection in what she was saying, because gelatine is made from collagen too, traditionally produced from animal skin, bones and connective tissue.
Hydrolysed collagen supplements are processed differently and broken down further into smaller peptides, so I'm not suggesting that an expensive collagen supplement is literally the same thing as eating a cube of jelly, or that Grandma's jelly cube was a proven nail treatment. But gelatine and collagen supplements are certainly rather closer relatives than all that beautiful wellness packaging might have us imagine, and I rather love that my grandmother was talking about the same basic protein decades ago without ever once using the words premium hydrolysed collagen peptides.
After all, that phrase sounds considerably more luxurious written across a beautiful tub than explaining that the collagen has been extracted from animal skin, bones or fish scales. Neither description is necessarily bad, but they create rather different mental images, and if you're vegetarian or vegan it's particularly worth knowing that despite how lovely and oceanic the word “marine” sounds, marine collagen comes from fish and isn't plant-based.
But Do Collagen Supplements Actually Work for Your Skin?
This is where things become particularly interesting, because eating collagen doesn't mean your body simply takes your morning scoop and sends it directly to your crow's feet, forehead lines or whichever other part of your face the beauty industry has most recently encouraged you to worry about. Like other proteins, collagen is broken down during digestion into smaller peptides and amino acids, which your body can then use according to its needs.
Some studies have reported improvements in skin hydration, elasticity and wrinkles, and a large 2025 analysis of 23 randomised trials involving nearly 1,500 people found that, when all the studies were considered together, collagen supplements appeared to have benefits. That sounds pretty convincing until you reach a rather interesting part of the findings, because when researchers looked only at the higher-quality studies, those apparent benefits disappeared, and the same happened when they looked at studies without pharmaceutical-industry funding.
Other research has reached more positive conclusions, so I'm certainly not going to tell you collagen doesn't work because the evidence isn't that black and white. What I think we can fairly say is that it might help, but the marketing often sounds considerably more certain than the science actually is, although I suppose might make a modest difference doesn't look quite as beautiful written across the front of the tub.
What Is “Vegan Collagen” and Does It Actually Contain Collagen?
The whole idea of “vegan collagen” makes me smile slightly, because most products described that way don't actually contain collagen. Plants don't naturally contain collagen, so what many vegan versions contain instead are nutrients and amino acids intended to support our bodies' own collagen production, including good old-fashioned vitamin C, which we can also get from peppers, broccoli, strawberries, blackcurrants, kiwi, citrus fruits and plenty of other foods. Protein matters too, because our bodies need amino acids to make collagen in the first place.
Full disclosure, I sometimes take a vegan collagen-support supplement myself, not because I imagine it's travelling magically through my body before arriving at my forehead and ironing out my wrinkles, but because there are days when my diet is brilliant, colourful and beautifully balanced and there are days when it most definitely isn't. 😂 On those less-than-perfect days, I quite like knowing I'm giving my body some of the nutrients it needs to carry on doing what it already knows how to do.
I'm not taking it because I'm frightened of ageing or because I believe my 47-year-old face needs repairing; I've looked into what I'm taking, understand what it actually is and sometimes want that extra nutritional support. Of course, I could make sure I'm eating enough protein and plenty of vitamin-C-rich fruit and vegetables every single day, but life doesn't always look like the beautifully balanced meal plan we imagined on Sunday evening, and sometimes it's simply easier to take the bloody supplement than remember to eat the broccoli.
I Think This Is About Something Bigger Than Collagen
Collagen itself doesn't bother me, and if you know what it is, you're comfortable consuming animal-derived ingredients, you can afford it and you enjoy taking it, then crack on. What bothers me far more is the fear that can be used to sell it, because we've taken something completely normal, ageing, and broken it down into a collection of increasingly frightening-sounding deficiencies such as collagen loss, loss of firmness, fine lines, sagging and that particularly delightful phrase, “crepey skin”.
The beauty industry has been doing something very similar with skincare for years, encouraging us to fight wrinkles, reverse ageing, correct imperfections, restore youth and turn back time, until simply having an older face can begin to feel like a problem we're somehow responsible for solving. The products themselves aren't necessarily the problem; it's the language surrounding them and that quiet, repeated suggestion that something completely normal happening to our bodies is actually something going wrong.
“Food noise” encourages us to examine our thoughts about food, “anti-ageing” encourages us to examine our faces, and now “collagen loss” encourages us to examine what's happening underneath them. Before we know it, we're monitoring our appetite, wrinkles, protein, collagen, muscle mass, hair and skin, wondering whether we're getting enough of this or losing too much of that, and somehow there always seems to be another part of ourselves that could do with a little optimisation and, rather conveniently, another product waiting to sell us the solution.
What If We Nourished Instead?
Perhaps, before reaching for another tub promising to replace whatever we're being told we've lost, we could ask ourselves the same question I asked in my last blog: what does my body actually need from me?
Maybe it needs enough protein and plenty of colourful fruit and vegetables, including foods rich in vitamin C that help our bodies make collagen naturally. Maybe it needs us to move, maintain our strength, get enough sleep, protect our skin from excessive sun exposure and avoid smoking, while remembering that looking after our skin doesn't have to mean constantly trying to change it. It can simply mean nourishing it, protecting it and enjoying the ritual of caring for the skin we've got.
If you want to take collagen and you've looked at the evidence, understand what you're buying and decided it feels right for you, then that's a perfectly valid choice. I just don't want any of us making that choice because somebody has frightened us about what will happen to our faces if we dare to get older.
I didn't create Olive & Joyce because I wanted women to spend their lives desperately trying to make 50-year-old skin look 25. I created it because I believe our skin deserves to be cared for at 25, 50, 75 and hopefully long beyond that, because looking after ourselves and trying to erase ourselves are two very different things.
So perhaps the darkest secret about collagen isn't what's inside the tub after all, but how profitable we've made the perfectly natural process of growing older and how easily caring for ourselves can become confused with being encouraged to fear what will happen if we don't buy the next thing promising to keep ageing at bay.
There's an enormous difference between caring for the skin you're in and being frightened into wishing you had somebody else's, and if I'm lucky enough to keep growing older, I'd much rather spend those years caring for mine, every bloody wrinkle of it.
With love,
Emily x
Founder of Olive & Joyce