Supplements · Independent Review

Does Collagen Help With the Signs of Ageing? I Spent 10 Years Testing the UK's Most Popular Collagens to Find Out

By Dr Naomi Newman-Beinart, PhD

Chartered Psychologist & Nutritionist

Published August 2026

If you're anything like the women I see in my clinic every week, you've probably stood in front of the mirror at some point after 40 and thought: where did that come from? The skin that feels a little thinner. The nails that suddenly split. The hair that isn't quite as thick in the ponytail as it used to be.

I hear the same sentence almost every week: "I feel like I've aged overnight." And more often than not, the next question is: "Does collagen actually do anything, or is it just another expensive trend?"

It's a fair question, and I'm not going to pretend collagen is a miracle. It isn't. No powder is going to turn back the clock, and anyone promising that is selling you something. But as a nutritionist, and, frankly, as a 47-year-old woman who was quietly horrified by what her own hair and nails started doing in her early forties, I can tell you that the research on collagen is genuinely interesting, and my own experience has made me a believer in the right one.

The catch is that word: right. Because "collagen" on a label tells you almost nothing. I've now tried well over twenty of them, and the difference between the best and the worst is enormous. Not in some vague way, but in the things that actually matter: how much collagen is genuinely in each serving, what else has been thrown in with it, and whether you can realistically take it every single day without dreading it.

One of the first questions I get asked is whether it matters where collagen comes from. The two you'll see most are marine, made from fish, and bovine, made from cattle. Both are hydrolysed, which just means broken down small enough for the body to absorb easily. The main practical difference is the type of collagen you get: marine is naturally richest in Types I and III, which happen to be the ones most associated with skin. That's my personal reason for leaning towards marine, though a good bovine collagen is still a good product, and you'll see one high on my list below. Source matters less than the two things people forget to check: the dose, and what else is in the tub.

So I did the boring, methodical thing. I bought the best-known collagen powders on the UK market, the ones you've seen advertised everywhere, the ones with the big reviews and the celebrity faces, and I took each one properly, at a genuine clinical dose, for months at a time. Below is my honest ranking of five of them, powder against powder, with the one I settled on at the top.

★ The one I've taken every day for five years

#1

Correxiko Marine Collagen Powder

Once I found this one, I stopped looking. It's been my daily collagen for five years now, and it's the only supplement I take without fail every single morning. Everything else I own, I forget.

Two things put it at the top. First, the dose. Each serving gives you a full 10,000mg, so 10 grams, of collagen, which is the sort of amount the research actually uses. So many products give you a fraction of that and rely on you not checking. As someone in my forties, I want the clinically relevant dose, and Correxiko builds its whole serving around it rather than making the tub look better value by quietly under-dosing.

Second, and this is my favourite thing about it: the ingredients list reads "100% marine collagen." That's it. No sugar, no sweeteners, no bulking agents, no fillers, no "natural flavourings." When I open the tub there's no strong fishy smell, and in a drink there's genuinely no taste. I bake with it, put it in my morning tea, and my not-so-secret indulgence is stirring it into a proper hot chocolate in winter. You'd never know it was there. It's also the only one I tested that dissolves properly in a cold drink; most powders clump into a little ball unless the liquid is hot.

My clients say the same things back to me that I noticed myself. Nails first, usually within a few weeks, then hair, then skin that just quietly stops bothering you.

One tip I give everyone: take it with vitamin C. Your body uses vitamin C to make collagen, so I always pair the two. It takes no effort at all. I have mine with a squeeze of lemon in warm water, or alongside some berries at breakfast, and if you'd rather not think about it, their capsule version has the vitamin C and hyaluronic acid built in. Do that and you're giving it the best possible chance to work.

A couple of honest caveats. If you have a fish allergy this one is out, as it's marine-derived. And if you're someone who wants a flavoured product, my sister would want it in sixteen flavours, the plainness won't be for you, although personally I'd much rather add my own. It isn't the cheapest tub on the shelf either, though taken daily it works out competitively, and I'd rather pay for collagen than for sugar.

• Source Marine, double-hydrolysed
• Collagen / serving 10,000mg, a full clinical-level dose
• Other ingredients None. 100% marine collagen
• Dissolves Cleanly, in hot and cold drinks
• Taste / smell Neutral, no fishy smell, no aftertaste
• Best taken with Vitamin C, for the best results
• Recognition H&H Wellness Awards 2025, Winner  ·  Beauty Shortlist Wellbeing Awards 2024, Editor's Choice

See Correxiko Marine Collagen Powder

Opens the Correxiko website in a new tab

"I've tried other brands and this one tops them all for me. I especially like the fact there are no binders or anything else added."

This is a genuinely good product, and I want to be clear about that. It's one of the collagens you see advertised everywhere, with excellent reviews, and having taken it for a couple of months I can see why. It's a bovine collagen, sourced from cattle rather than fish, and unlike a lot of what I looked at, it hasn't been bulked out with nonsense. It's clean, it's hydrolysed so it's easy to absorb, and it mixed nicely.

So why is it below Correxiko? Honestly, it came down to the smell and taste. I'm sensitive to it, and being someone who doesn't eat much meat, I found the scent of a bovine collagen off-putting first thing in the morning. I could smell it when I opened it in a way I don't with Correxiko. That's a personal thing and others may not notice it at all. I felt it worked well; I just didn't enjoy taking it as much, and with collagen, enjoying it is what keeps you consistent.

One practical note if you're comparing labels, because a "serving" doesn't mean the same thing on both. Ancient + Brave's serving is based on 5g, whereas the dose I take, and the amount most research uses, is 10g a day, so I get through a tub twice as quickly. When I worked it out at that 10g dose, Ancient + Brave came to around £1.60 a day, against roughly 89p a day for Correxiko at its one-off price. Both are quality collagen; I just think it's worth comparing them at the dose you'll actually take, rather than the serving printed on the tub.

• Source Bovine (cattle), hydrolysed
• Collagen / serving 5g per serving
• Ingredients Clean, no added fillers or sweeteners
• Dissolves Well
• Taste / smell Noticeable scent I found off-putting
• My verdict Excellent quality; taste held it back for me

I'd rate this and Ancient + Brave as almost equally good. Genuinely lovely, well-made products, and the marine source means it's in the same family as my top pick. I liked it. My honest hesitations were, again, sensory: it was a little more fishy-smelling than Correxiko, which I half-expected, and I found it didn't dissolve as well in cold drinks. Mixed into something cold it tended to leave a bit of a lump unless I whisked it.

None of that makes it a bad choice, far from it. If you're set on a marine collagen and don't mind a slightly stronger scent, it's a solid option. It just sits a step below Correxiko on the two things I care about day-to-day: a completely neutral smell and a clean mix in any drink, hot or cold.

• Source Marine (wild codfish, MSC-certified)
• Collagen / serving 5g (5,000mg)
• Ingredients Clean formulation
• Dissolves Good in hot drinks; less so in cold
• Taste / smell A little more fishy than Correxiko
• My verdict Lovely product; small sensory trade-offs

Another one I genuinely rated as a product. It's a marine collagen, quite similar to the others in consistency, and I've no complaints about the quality. For me it fell a little further down purely on smell and taste. It was the most noticeably fishy of the powders I tested, and in plain water that came through more than I'd like. Mixed into a stronger drink it was fine.

If sensory things don't bother you much, you might rank this higher than I have. My ranking is heavily weighted towards "would I happily drink this every morning for months," and this one I found a little harder to love on that front. But it's a perfectly good collagen.

• Source Marine
• Collagen / serving 5g sachets (two a day for a 10g dose)
• Ingredients No obvious fillers
• Dissolves Reasonable
• Taste / smell The fishiest of the group for me
• My verdict Good quality; scent was the sticking point

One thing worth knowing up front: unlike the others here, Elavate isn't a straight collagen powder. It's a collagen powder with added vitamins mixed in, which partly explains both the taste and the higher price. It comes at the bottom of my list.

On the practical side it actually mixed well, which I always appreciate. But the smell wasn't particularly inviting, and I didn't think it tasted that good either, unless I had it in coffee, which hid the flavour quite well. I tried it in herbal tea, coffee, a smoothie and in water, the same way I tested all the others. It's also very pricey, at around £49 for a 20-day supply at full price, though it's often discounted below that.

Elavate describes its product as a "Multi-Collagen Superblend", providing 8,090mg of collagen from bovine, marine and chicken sources. It's worth looking a little more closely at the amounts, though: 7,900mg comes from bovine collagen, compared with 150mg marine and 40mg chicken, so roughly 97.7%, 1.9% and 0.5% respectively. The individual amounts are disclosed on their website, but I'd personally like to see that breakdown made more prominent, because the term "multi-collagen" on its own doesn't tell you how much of each source you're actually getting.

There's nothing wrong with bovine collagen if that's what you're choosing to buy. My general advice is simply to read the ingredient list and the amounts, so you know exactly what you're getting for your money.

• Format Collagen powder with added vitamins & minerals
• Collagen blend 8,090mg: 97.7% bovine, 1.9% marine, 0.5% chicken
• Labelling Amounts disclosed on site; not prominent in the headline
• Dissolves Well
• Taste / smell Not inviting; better in coffee
• Price £49 for a 20-day supply (full price); often discounted
• My verdict Bottom of my list on cost, taste and value

So, does collagen help, or is it hype?

My honest answer, after trying more than twenty products over the past 10 years: it's not hype, but it's not magic either. It's a bit like eating your vegetables. It won't do anything dramatic overnight, and it won't rescue a lifestyle that's working against you. You still need the protein, the sleep, the water, the sensible-most-of-the-time approach (I had a tiramisu last night and I regret nothing). But taken properly, at a real dose, every day, I think it earns its place. I've watched it in my own hair and nails, and I've watched clients come back three months later looking and, more importantly, feeling like themselves again.

The two mistakes I see people make are taking it sporadically, and buying a product that doesn't contain enough collagen to matter. Get those two things right, pair it with a little vitamin C, and you give it a genuine chance to work.

Which is exactly why I'm still taking Correxiko five years on. It gives you the full dose, it's nothing but collagen, and, the quiet reason it actually works, it's pleasant enough to take that you'll still be taking it in three months' time. That's the one that makes the difference.