What does low collagen do to the face?

Layers one and two: the skin, which collagen touches, and the fat, which it does not

What does low collagen do to the face is a question that assumes a face is skin, and the honest page begins by taking the face apart, because a face ages in five layers, collagen belongs to one of them, and most of what a person sees in the mirror and blames on collagen is happening in the other four. Layer one is the skin, and it is the layer low collagen actually affects. Dermal collagen and elastin decline with age, falling steadily in men and sharply after menopause in women, and faster still with sun exposure and smoking, which degrade the fibres directly; the dermis thins, loses its recoil and holds less water, and the face shows it as fine lines around the eyes and mouth, a crepe texture on the cheeks and neck, a less even tone and skin that takes longer to spring back from a pinch. This is the layer the oral collagen skin trials measured, by cutometer suction for elasticity and corneometer for hydration, and moved by a few percent at 2.5 to 10 grams a day over eight to twelve weeks, in small, mostly industry-funded trials, changes a device detects and a mirror generally does not, so low collagen in the face means a thinner, less elastic, finer-lined skin layer, and a supplement that addresses it addresses that layer alone and modestly. Layer two is the fat, and it is where most of the mirror's complaint actually lives. The face carries superficial and deep fat compartments, in the temples, under the eyes, in the cheeks and along the jaw, that give a young face its smooth convexity, and across the decades those pads shrink and descend, the temples and under-eye areas hollowing as fat is lost, the cheek pads sliding down to gather along the jaw as jowls and beside the mouth as the nasolabial folds deepen, so that the sagging, hollowing and heaviness a person reads as a tired or aged face is largely a redistribution of volume beneath a skin that is simply following it. No skin treatment, no cream and no swallowed collagen reaches the fat compartments, because they are not skin and their change is not a collagen change, which is why the interventions aimed at this layer are a practitioner's, fillers restoring volume where it was lost, and why a reader who takes collagen for jowls is treating the wrong layer.

Layers three, four and five: the ligaments, the bone and the surface, and what low collagen in the face honestly means

Layer three is the muscles and retaining ligaments, the fibrous bands that tether the facial skin and fat to the bone beneath at fixed points, along the cheekbone, the jaw and the eye socket; with age these bands loosen and lengthen, so the softened fat pads above them slide further and the folds between tethered and untethered zones deepen, the mechanism behind the deepening fold from nose to mouth and the marionette lines below it, a connective tissue change that is collagen in the broad sense and is not reached by any supplement, since it is a mechanical loosening of ligaments under decades of gravity and movement. Layer four is the bone, and it is the layer almost no one thinks of: the facial skeleton remodels with age, the eye sockets widening so the eyes look more deep-set and the brows descend, the midface losing projection so the cheeks flatten, the jaw receding and its angle softening so the lower face loses its line, all of it bone resorbing beneath everything above, so that the scaffold the skin and fat sit on is itself shrinking, and no layer above can look as it did when the layer beneath has changed shape. Layer five is the surface, the stratum corneum, whose hydration changes by the day with weather, heating, cleanser and the water a reader drinks, the layer a moisturiser and a glass of water move within hours and the one a reader feels in the first week of any new habit. Take the five together and what low collagen does to the face has an exact answer: it thins and creases the skin layer, the one layer collagen belongs to, by the slow decline of dermal collagen and elastin, while the sagging, hollowing and jowling that dominate the mirror are mostly fat and bone, layers two and four, loosened by layer three, and are addressed, where anyone addresses them, by practitioners with fillers, lifts and energy devices, not by tubs. The skin layer's own levers are sunscreen first, a retinoid second, not smoking third, and oral collagen last and modestly, with the register's skin sentences on any tub belonging to vitamin C and zinc. The worked example is for the skin layer only, on its true terms: two capsules, 1200mg hydrolysed type 1 marine collagen with 12mg vitamin C plus zinc, 120 for £16.99 at 28p a day, lab tested and UK made, below the 2.5 to 10 grams the skin trials gave, taken for vitamin C's collagen formation sentence for skin and zinc's normal skin line, touching no layer beneath the dermis. What does low collagen do to the face: it thins the top layer of five, and the face that sags is sagging in the other four.

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