She was almost right - it wasn't the collagen. It was the format all along.
I’d tried collagen and quietly given up. Twice. Powders that tasted of the sea. A liquid that cost a fortune and did nothing. I’m 58, and I’d more or less decided this was just what my skin looked like now - and that the ninety pounds I handed my facialist every month was the only thing holding it together. Most women I know have tried at least one collagen. Most of us stopped within a few months. Not because we gave up. Because nothing happened. Here’s what finally changed my mind - and it wasn’t the marketing.
She used to be a pharmacist, and she said it in one sentence: most collagen never survives your stomach. You swallow it and assume it gets to work. It doesn’t. Collagen is a protein, and your stomach acid has one job - breaking protein down.
Within minutes the peptides are destroyed, broken into amino acids before they ever reach the place they’re needed. What your skin actually needs is intact collagen peptides delivered to the small intestine, where 99% of absorption happens. Powders and liquids cannot do that. It doesn’t matter if the label says 10,000mg or 5,000mg. That number is what enters your stomach. Not what reaches your skin. They had been selling me dose, not delivery. For years. Which is why I felt nothing. And stopped.
of nutrient absorption happens in the small intestine. Most
collagen never makes it that far.
By the time she mentioned it, I’d stopped believing any of them. But she’d been taking this one for two years, and her skin looked better than mine had in a decade. So I did what I always do. I went looking for the catch. What I found was the opposite. This one wasn’t built by a marketing team. It took one pharmacist ten years.
Pupinder Ghatora is an award-winning pharmacist. MPharm, MRPharmS qualifications. Honoured at 10 Downing Street. He’d spent years recommending collagen supplements to patients. Trusted brands. Reasonable doses. Taken consistently. And he kept watching the same thing happen. They’d come back. Nothing had changed. He knew the science worked. The delivery didn’t. So he started working with David Hyland, a pharmaceutical R&D consultant whose wife was experiencing the same thing, let down by the products available.
Together they founded Ingenious Laboratories in 2014. And spent the next decade solving one problem. How do you get collagen to the only place in the body where it can be absorbed? The answer, a patented enteric capsule. Made from 100% natural cellulose. It survives stomach acid intact. Travels to the small intestine. Releases there. Where 99% of absorption actually happens. Not into your stomach. Into your skin. That was the part that made me think maybe it wasn’t me that had failed. It was the format.
The answer… a patented enteric capsule. Made from 100% natural cellulose. It survives stomach acid intact. Travels to the small intestine. Releases there.
Where 99% of absorption actually happens. Not into your stomach. Not broken down into amino acids your body uses for something else entirely.
Into your skin.
What's inside each capsule:
Low molecular weight hydrolysed collagen peptides. Small enough to be
absorbed as collagen, not broken down as protein fuel.
Binds up to 1,000x its weight in water. Restores the moisture your skin stops producing with age.
An antioxidant 6,000x more potent than vitamin C. Protects the collagen once it arrives at your skin.
HYDROLYSED MARINE COLLAGEN CAPSULES
Ten years of pharmaceutical development. One independent clinical trial. The full study is publicly available.