Banking On Collagen (& Losing Billions)
An interview with Vogue Business and Roisin Lanigan.
Have you heard the joke about “collagen banking”? The one where cosmetic corporations scam customers out of $1.2 billion by convincing them their ever-decreasing “skin elasticity” is a worthy investment? Ha, ha.
Collagen banking — the latest sales pitch for aesthetic immortality — is a sort of “pre-emptive anti-aging,” Roisin Lanigan writes for Vogue Business. It’s based on the idea that “after a certain age — around 25 to 30 — our collagen production naturally drops off, and our skin gradually starts to lose the kind of plumpness and elasticity we associate with looking young.” (That checks out.) If you “bank” collagen before this depletion starts, the theory goes, you’ll look younger for longer. (That doesn’t, really.)
Lanigan interviewed me for the Vogue Business piece, and I was grateful for the chance to yell “pseudoscience! beauty capital! control!”, etc. You can read it here. She also shared our full interview via her newsletter,
, which you can read here.Below, an excerpt of our conversation.
Roisin Lanigan: How aware are you of “collagen banking” as a new obsession in the skincare and anti-aging world?
Jessica DeFino (me): I’ve seen the term pop up here and there, but there’s nothing particularly new to this trend. It’s just kind of a new spin on old ideas. If there is anything new about collagen banking, it’s the sense of urgency — this framework makes it seem like you have to rush and boost your collagen now while there’s still time. It’s more panic-inducing, more urgent than how we’ve talked about it in the past. The term “banking” is interesting also, an “investment” in “your skin’s elasticity”... similar terms like “face card”, you know, “the face card never declines” — these are all not-so-subtle nods to beauty being a form of capital. Study after study shows that people who meet the standard of beauty benefit from it economically, professionally, socially, and people who don’t meet the standard of beauty are punished for it. You incur social, financial, political, economic consequences. This idea of “banking” your collagen is a blatant acknowledgement of beauty as a form of capital.
RL: A while back, you wrote something on how the collagen in our bodies is the only collagen we need. Is there a pseudoscience within the beauty industry that is trying to make us think otherwise?
JD: This does fall into the category of pseudoscience. What the beauty industry loves to do is take a kernel of truth and spin it out into a pseudoscientific marketing concept. Here, the kernel of truth is that: yes, your collagen levels do start to decline after a certain age, after 25 or 30. But that’s not a disaster. That’s no less normal than going through menopause. It’s just one of the many ways the body changes as it ages, and it’s not something to panic about. But because the collagen hype is based on scientific facts about levels of a real substance in your body, it becomes medicalized — it’s framed as a medical or healthcare measure to protect and increase your collagen levels. But if that was the case, wouldn’t we also be worried about things like the collagen in our joints? Collagen does so much more than give us plump, elastic skin! The only role of collagen that gets any airtime in the media is in terms of skin elasticity and youthful aesthetics. I don’t think there’s anything health-centric here, and I don’t think there’s any new science to back up the idea of “collagen banking.” Sorry, your body just loses collagen! It’s just what happens as we age! If you look at the factors that break down collagen, it’s things like smoking and sun exposure — and at the same time as collagen banking is trending, we’re seeing cigarettes and tanning coming back into vogue. It makes no sense. If you’re not leading a lifestyles that’s supportive of your collagen in other ways, to me that shows a lack of true intellectual curiosity about what collagen is and what breaks it down, and instead jumping on the consumerist bandwagon. The other thing that’s interesting is there’s so much panic in the beauty industry about how when collagen declines your skin gets less plump… But your skin has this amazing ability to slow the rate of cellular renewal as you age, so you have a thicker barrier on top of the dermis (the layer of your skin that holds collagen). The body has this give and take built into it. We really don’t need to worry too much about it.
RL: Why do we keep getting fooled by this science that extols the virtues of vitamin C, microneedling, retinoids and now “collagen banking”? Is it because we're really so scared of looking older in any way?
JD: There is a very real fear of looking older. We’re terrified of being older. If you look at statistics of young women — especially in terms of levels of depression and anxiety — it’s obvious. We’re scared of being in the world, we’re scared of aging into an increasingly terrifying world, we’re scared of the responsibilities that come with that. We’re faced with our mortality in so many different ways: the pandemic, accelerating climate change, the war in Gaza. These are scary things, and controlling the body has always been a coping mechanism — if the world feels out of control, sometimes it feels like your body is the only thing you can control. This is known to be the root of so many eating disorders; they’re often a way of exerting control when you feel out of control. And I feel like this obsession with anti-aging is, I would go so far as to say, a disordered way of enacting control on the body as a coping mechanism for feeling out of control in other ways. Separate to that, people have been looking for the fountain of youth for hundreds of years. This is a classic human longing — to look younger, to be younger, to not grow up, to not die. It’s really easy for the beauty industry to capitalize on, and that’s what we’re seeing here.
For more — how AI-inspired ideals intersect with anti-aging, why vegetables and red meat are better “collagen” investments than retinol and microneedles — head over to Notions.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.