I'll be honest with you. When collagen first came up as a product idea at Innermost, my instinct was to say no.
Not because the science wasn't there. But because, in my head, collagen was a beauty category. Influencer unboxings. "Glow from within" written in a font I couldn't take seriously. It felt like someone else's territory. And as a founder who has spent years building a brand based on science and evidence, I wasn't sure I wanted to go near it.
So I didn't. For a while.
Then I read the research.
And that's what this email is about. Not a product pitch. Just the honest account of what changed my mind, what the science actually says, and why I think the collagen category has a problem that nobody in it seems keen to talk about.
The thing that shifted my thinking was understanding the difference between whole collagen and hydrolysed collagen peptides. These are not the same thing, and most products on the market either don't explain the distinction or hope you won't ask.
Here's why the collagen matters.
Collagen is a large protein molecule. When you consume it in its whole form, your digestive system breaks it down into amino acids, which then get distributed wherever the body decides they're needed. There's no guarantee those amino acids go to your skin, joints, or connective tissue. Your body routes them where it sees fit.
Hydrolysed collagen peptides are different. The hydrolysis process pre-breaks the collagen into short-chain peptides, small enough to be absorbed more or less intact through the gut wall and into the bloodstream.
Studies have found that these specific peptides, particularly dipeptides like hydroxyproline-proline and hydroxyproline-glycine, accumulate in skin tissue and stimulate fibroblast activity. Fibroblasts are the cells responsible for producing new collagen. So you're not just giving the body raw materials. You're delivering a signal.
The dose in those studies matters. Most of the positive findings clustered around 2.5g to 10g of hydrolysed collagen per day. When I started looking at what other brands were actually putting in their products, I kept seeing doses of 1g, sometimes less, priced as if they were delivering something real. At 1g, the evidence base doesn't hold. The research wasn't done at that dose.
Then there's the vitamin C problem.
This is the one that frustrates me most, because it is completely avoidable and almost nobody bothers. Collagen synthesis is not a solo process. Your body cannot produce new collagen without vitamin C. It acts as an essential co-factor for the enzymes prolyl hydroxylase and lysyl hydroxylase, which stabilise the collagen triple helix structure. Without adequate vitamin C, the process stalls.
If you're taking a collagen supplement without vitamin C, you are supplementing one part of a two-part system. Look at the label of any collagen product in your house right now. More often than not, the vitamin C is absent, or present in a token amount that makes no functional difference.
This is what I mean when I say the collagen category has a problem. It's not that the science doesn't work. It's that most of the products on the market are not formulated to deliver what the science supports.
When we built The Glow Blend.
The brief was simple: formulate to the research, not to the margin. Hydrolysed collagen peptides at a dose the evidence supports. Vitamin C is included at a meaningful level, because without it the collagen synthesis mechanism doesn't fire. Hyaluronic acid, because the evidence for its role in skin hydration is strong and complementary. Biotin and folic acid for hair and nail structure.
The Glow Blend is unflavoured, which matters more than it sounds. Most collagen drinks use sweeteners to mask the taste of poorly sourced collagen. Unflavoured means the collagen is clean enough to not need disguising, and it dissolves into coffee or tea without changing the flavour.
I take it in my morning coffee (The Rise Blend). I started for the same reason I wanted to know the science: I wanted to understand what we were recommending. What I noticed after eight weeks is in a different email. This one is just about the journey from no to yes, and why the evidence was the thing that moved me.
If you know someone who has written off collagen as not for them, forward this. That's exactly what I thought.
Until next time.
