What Does Collagen Cream Do?
It seems as though there's a skincare solution for practically every need. There's a moisturizer if you have dry skin, oil removers if you have oily or acne-prone skin, and even specific skincare solutions to help you alleviate wrinkles or other signs of aging. But what about collagen cream?
Collagen cream is important because it provides a single key ingredient to your skin cells. But does it really work, and what does collagen cream do in the first place? Let’s answer both of these questions and more.
Collagen’s Role in Skin Health
Collagen is a vital protein for overall health, especially skin health and functionality. In a nutshell, your skin uses collagen to retain its strength and elasticity. The more collagen your skin has, the more youthful it will likely look and feel and the less likely it will be to sag or develop wrinkles over time.
However, while our bodies produce plenty of collagen when they are young, they also produce less collagen as we get older. Therefore, it’s important to replenish this collagen through other sources like supplements or certain skincare routines.
For example, Hope Health’s Immune + Organic Supplements are ideal for boosting the health of one’s immune system. Perhaps more importantly, they’re packed with organic, healthy ingredients that may improve the health of your skin over time.
Ingredients like vitamin C, garlic, oregano, and moringa leaf combine to give your skin exactly what it needs for maximum health and longevity. When used with a collagen cream, the results could be spectacular.
Collagen cream is one of the most important skincare supplements as it is applied directly to the skin and may provide serious benefits in the long term. But it's important to understand how collagen cream works, so you don't develop inappropriate expectations.
How Does Collagen Cream Work?
A collagen cream is usually a basic skincare moisturizer or serum with plenty of collagen packed into its formula. Alongside collagen, a collagen cream might include additional ingredients like vitamin C, vitamin A, hyaluronic acid, and so on.
Collagen cream is applied to the skin as a topical solution. After rubbing the collagen cream into your skin for a few seconds, your skin cells should theoretically absorb the nutrients included and put them to good use.
But does collagen cream really work to give your skin tons of collagen? Not exactly.
In fact, it's more accurate to say that the collagen in a collagen cream is less valuable to your skin cells than the raw materials they need to make their own collagen. This isn't to say that collagen and collagen cream are completely useless. Your skin almost certainly still benefits from the collagen contained in these topical solutions.
That said, any collagen applied topically is not as bioavailable or absorbable as collagen created by your body from scratch.
Even so, once your skin absorbs the collagen, it can use some of that protein for several key benefits.
Hope Health’s Hydrate skin moisturizer contains palmitoyl tripeptide-1 and acetyl hexapeptide-8 to promote and support collagen production in the skin.
Collagen Cream Benefits
Just what does collagen cream really do when you apply it? Collagen cream is thought to provide several benefits like:
- Reduction in the appearance of wrinkles, age spots, and other surface-level signs of aging
- Reduced discomfort, which can damage the collagen currently in your skin and accelerate certain signs of aging, like the formation of wrinkles
- Skin brightening or tone evening
- Improved moisturization or resistance to dry skin
While collagen could help with each of these demonstrable benefits, it’s likely that the other ingredients included in collagen cream do a lot of heavy lifting. For example, vitamin C is well known as a potent antioxidant, and it can even help your skin’s barrier repair itself over time. This, in turn, could contribute to healthier overall skin moisture.
Is It Better To Use Collagen or Vitamins To Make More Collagen?
Overall, it’s a better idea to take plenty of vitamins and minerals and make sure you eat a well-rounded diet than using collagen cream. Why?
Simply put, when your body has everything it needs to make collagen, your skin cells will produce that collagen more readily than before. As we get older, our skin cells become a little less efficient at taking a few vitamins and minerals and making tons of collagen from those raw materials.
When we give our skin cells more ingredients to make collagen, our bodies may surprise us! We may improve our bodies' natural collagen-creating efforts without having to pack our skin cells with artificial collagen along the way.
The collagen our bodies make is more bioavailable and easier to leverage for skin elasticity and strength than the collagen we get from collagen creams. Again, collagen creams aren’t completely useless. But taking vitamins or giving your body what it needs to make natural collagen is usually superior for long-term results.
That said, taking vitamins while also using a cream that helps bolster collagen production may enhance your results altogether. Hope Health supplies both vitamins and skincare products to help you achieve your best skin yet.
How To Protect Natural Collagen Production
No one is completely immune to the side effects of aging. That said, you can do a lot to make sure that your body produces natural collagen for as long as possible by practicing a few strategies:
- For starters, you should wear sunscreen anytime your skin is exposed to sunlight for a good while. That’s because UV radiation can break down collagen in your skin and accelerate the aging process.
By breaking down collagen already present, your skin cells have to compensate by producing extra collagen. Depending on your genetics and age, your skin may never catch up once it has sustained damage to its current collagen reserves.
- Not smoking or maintaining any unhealthy habits in the long term. Unhealthy habits can seriously impact the health of your body as a whole, as well as your skin health.
- Not using skincare ingredients with overly synthetic or chemical ingredients. Such ingredients can damage your skin cells and diminish collagen levels across the board. In other words, this may accelerate the loss of natural collagen in your skin.
Instead, practicing a solid skincare routine, maintaining a healthy diet, and taking supplements to ensure that your skin cells have everything they need is the best way to maximize collagen production throughout your life. Multivitamins, iron supplements, and more can support your overall health and ensure you aren’t deficient in any major area.
Summary
All in all, collagen cream is used to help alleviate some of the signs of aging, to make your skin look and feel younger than ever, and for similar purposes. But while collagen cream could help to some extent toward each of these goals, providing your skin with the vitamins and minerals, it needs to make its own collagen could be better in the long term.
With that in mind, making sure that you get the best supplements and products for your skincare goals and that you eat a healthy diet are both vital. Hope Health’s online store has all the supplements you could need to foster a great skin barrier and give your skin cells plenty of great vitamins and minerals. Check out our organic supplements today!
Sources:
Collagen | The Nutrition Source | Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health
The Roles of Vitamin C in Skin Health | NCBI
UV Damage of Collagen: Insights from Model Collagen Peptides | NCBI