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Collagen peptides: on your skin or in your soup?

Probably in both. Bot not in pills. Chicken soup is good for the soul, helps with colds and tastes great, especially in the middle of winter. But when it comes to pills, it is highly unlikely that the small amount of collagen peptides in a pill (750 mg) will ever reach your skin. Just have the soup instead, depending how you make it it will contain about 10 g of amino acids.

What do we know about collagen? Collagen is a protein made by many animals, including us.

Amino acids are joined together in long chains to form a protein. The bond between amino acid residues is made by losing water. Just as the water was taken out (by complex enzymatic reactions) it can be put back. Long chains of proteins will be broken in small pieces and amino acids. This is what we do when we hydrolyze collagen, which otherwise is insoluble and would be useless on our skin.

When people say that collagen is too big to enter the skin, they are right: collagen is insoluble, it would not go anywhere. But the broken pieces can enter the skin and they do.

We at Skin Actives use collagen peptides resulting from the hydrolysis of (fish) collagen. This is a useful ingredient.  Just don’t forget that there is a lot more than collagen in our skin. In fact, our collagen serum works on the rest of the skin macromolecules as well, but collagen serum is shorter than “serum that preserves the integrity and health of your skin by supplying epidermal growth factor plus every ingredients known to help with protein integrity in the skin”.