Do collagen supplements really work?

Fair skin and beautiful appearance are the lifelong pursuits of many women, but as time goes by, skin problems such as spots and wrinkles gradually appear, causing distress and anxiety to many people. At this time, some people said, isn't it said that collagen can improve these problems? Is that true?

Collagen is familiar to everyone. It is one of the important components of the skin. When facing the problems of aging and bad skin, many people will think of supplementing collagen. So is collagen effective? Let's talk about this issue today.

01. Collagen

First of all, we have to talk about collagen.

Collagen is a very abundant protein in the human body, accounting for 25-30% of the total protein, and is basically distributed in various tissues of the human body.

For our skin, collagen is also one of the important structural components. It is an important filling and supporting substance for the skin, so it is also one of the important reasons why we can feel the elasticity of the skin in many cases. In addition, collagen itself has a strong hydrophilicity, so it is also an important factor in moisturizing our skin.

However, as time goes by, collagen itself begins to face some problems. I believe you can also see that one of the reasons why the skin becomes less elastic over time is that the collagen has changed.

The reason is that as we age, our body's ability to synthesize collagen also decreases. After all, skin cells themselves will gradually age. What's more troublesome is that the cross-linking and solidification of some collagen fibers will lead to a decrease in the mucopolysaccharides between cells. The end result is that the skin begins to lose its softness and elasticity, showing aging phenomena, such as spots, wrinkles, etc.

02. Is it useful to supplement collagen?

Since the aging of the skin is related to the loss of collagen, is it possible to make the skin more elastic by supplementing collagen?

In fact, this problem has been studied a long time ago, and research has confirmed that it can really be achieved.

For example, in a microneedle-injected human-like collagen treatment study, human-like collagen was introduced into the facial area of ​​the skin, including the forehead, cheeks, jaw, upper lip and nose through microneedle injection. [1]

The results showed that after the introduction, the facial performance was significantly improved, such as the elasticity increased significantly, the texture reduced, the pores shrank, and the facial moisture increased, which proved that human-like collagen does have the effect of improving skin problems.

In fact, even if microneedles are not used, similar effects can be achieved by directly applying the drug.

For example, in another study, Juzi Bio's recombinant human collagen dressing was used, and the users' skin was evaluated after three weeks of use.

Skin quality tests showed that both the absolute scores measured by the VISIA Skin Image Analyzer and the test results of SOFT5.5 showed improvements in facial conditions [2].

As shown in the table above, pigmentation, texture, pores, moisture, elasticity and other indicators have all been greatly improved, which shows that human-like collagen does show an effect.

03. Human-like collagen

However, you may have noticed that we repeatedly use the term "human-like collagen" here. What is this? Is it different from collagen?

Let's talk about collagen first. As we mentioned above, collagen can be said to be the largest protein component of mammals, and various mammals are rich in collagen.

However, if we humans need additional collagen, then a question arises: how to obtain collagen.

In fact, the earliest collagen was animal-derived, that is, extracted directly from animals. Even to this day, this is still the main source of collagen.

However, there are some problems with animal-derived collagen:

First of all, there are some differences between animal collagen and human collagen. After all, different species definitely have species specificity, and it is difficult for the human body to fully accept animal-derived collagen.

Secondly, it is difficult to achieve absolute purity when extracting animal collagen, as it may be mixed with some other animal ingredients.

The result is that when people use animal collagen, they may experience rejection problems or even allergies, which limits the application of collagen to a certain extent.

Human-like collagen is obtained by obtaining the gene sequence of human collagen from the human genome and inducing its expression in the laboratory, and finally extracting it. This type of collagen is extracted through biological genetic engineering transformation and can be absorbed by the human body.

Compared with animal-derived collagen, this type of collagen is closest to humans because it comes from human genes, thus reducing rejection and allergy problems, and therefore has been successful in practice.

It can be said that from the above series of introductions, we can see that in the face of skin problems caused by the passage of time, supplementing collagen is feasible. From the perspective of collagen, choosing human-like collagen that is closer to the structure of human collagen is not only safer, but also the effect of use can be guaranteed.

[1] Liu Lihong, Han Yue, Xi Jinpeng, Yang Rongya. Effect of microneedle-assisted human collagen on facial rejuvenation[J]. Chinese Journal of Aesthetic Medicine, 2012, 21(11): 1549-1551.

[2] Fan Xin, Han Yue, Qie Jinpeng, Yao Meihua, Yue Danxia, ​​Sun Weixin, Yang Rongya. Effect of recombinant human collagen mask on skin improvement[J]. Chinese Journal of Clinical Medicine, 2013, 20(01):77-78.