Do You Have Cow Brow?

Turns out your wrinkle fixers might have more in common with your Sunday roast than you’d think. In fact, collagen ingestibles can contain chicken feet, fish scales and pork products. Shocked? Read on…

- Becci Vallis

You’ve downed your green juice, eaten your avo on rye, and snacked on your protein bar, but have you had your skingestible yet? There’s a high chance you have – after all, ingestible beauty solutions are the new buzz in anti-ageing as brands put lotions and potions on the back burner in favour of upscale nutri-cosmetic pills and powders with alluring face-plumping claims.

The big selling point is that these little pills could work quicker and more effectively than anything we’ve been applying topically. Liquid formats, in particular, claim to work as soon as you’ve downed them, as the active ingredients have a higher bioavailabilty. Translation: they can bypass the gut (where active ingredients often get broken down), and are absorbed into the blood stream almost instantly. It’s a dream scenario for generation Zs with a short scroll-and-swipe attention span, and who are fully aware of the ticking timebomb of how much longer their insides will keep them baby-faced, especially when it comes to collagen production.

Collagen (in case you missed the memo) is what keeps skin plump and resilient, and we’ve been chasing our tails from as young as our mid twenties in a bid to save it. “The word collagen is derived from the Greek word ‘kolla’, meaning glue, but once we hit 25, it declines by 1% per year,” explains dermatologist Dr Alexis Granite. That may not sound like much but that’s just the natural degradation. Sprinkle in free radicals, exposure to UV rays and poor diet – all of which break down collagen bonds – and it’s a slippery slope to sagsville. No wonder a liquid promising eternal youth (almost) makes us salivate.