Collagen is everywhere in skincare. In creams, in serums, in powders you stir into coffee. It has become shorthand for firm, plump, youthful skin, and the industry sells it by the bucket load.
Here's what gets lost. Collagen is a protein. It's the most abundant protein in your body, and in your skin it's one of thousands of proteins working together. Once you understand that, most of what you've been told about collagen starts to look different.
What collagen actually is
Proteins are long chains of amino acids, folded into shapes that do a job. Collagen's job is structure. Three chains wind around each other into a rope, the ropes bundle into fibres, and the fibres form the scaffold that holds your skin up.
There are many types of collagen. The one that matters most in skin is collagen I. It makes up the large majority of the collagen in the dermis, the living layer beneath the surface, and it's the one that gives skin its firmness and its resistance to sagging. When people talk about collagen and skin, collagen I is what they mean, whether they know it or not.
Where it lives, and where it goes
Think of the dermis as a reserve. Cells called fibroblasts make collagen I and lay it down as a dense, springy mesh. It's built early, and for a while it's topped up as fast as it's used.
Then the balance tips. From the mid-twenties, skin loses roughly one per cent of its collagen every year, and after menopause the loss speeds up. Two things are happening at once. The fibroblasts make less, because accumulated oxidative damage has worn them down. And the collagen already there gets damaged faster, by sunlight, pollution and the everyday stress of the environment. Less coming in, more going out. The reserve shrinks.
That's why skin gets thinner, looser and slower to recover with age. Not because time passed. Because the scaffold was lost.
Why we don't add collagen
It's tempting to think the answer is to put collagen back. Rub it on, drink it, top up the reserve.
Collagen applied to the skin can't reach the dermis. The molecule is far too large to pass through the surface, so it sits on top, where it can hold water for a while and then wash off. Whatever it does, it isn't rebuilding the scaffold.
So we don't add collagen. We start somewhere else.
Collagen is part of the proteome
Collagen I doesn't work alone. It's one protein in a network of thousands: elastin for spring, keratin for resilience, and the enzymes and messengers that make, maintain and clear proteins all day long. Together they're your skin's proteome. It's where our research begins, and collagen I is one of the markers we watch most closely.
In the laboratory, we measure what environmental stress does to skin's proteins, in living human skin samples, layer by layer. We track carbonylation, the chemical signature oxidative stress leaves on proteins. And we measure collagen I directly, with and without our formulas, to see how the scaffold holds up under the pollution and UV-A of an ordinary day.
That's a different question from "does this product contain collagen". It's "what happens to your collagen when life happens to your skin". The first is a label. The second is evidence.
Collagen is a protein. It's part of a system. And the system is what we work on.