Does Collagen Help With Acne?

So, you’ve spent your remaining bank balance on serums and spot creams promising to help you get rid of your pimples (and their scars), cooked up every home remedy you could find online to help you annihilate your acne and still got no results *sigh*.

Don’t be disheartened, you’re not alone! While spot treatments can work on pimples, they’re topical treatments and work only on the uppermost layers of your skin. The stem of your pimple is actually much deeper in the skin, where your serums and spot treatments can’t reach.

If you really want to get rid of both your active acne and your scarring, you need to approach them from the inside out, namely by combining a topical treatment with a collagen supplement that works on your pimples from within.

Collagen. It’s the buzzword the beauty industry has been loving recently because of its ability to treat fine lines and wrinkles. But did you know that collagen can work wonders on helping you get rid of your acne as well?

Collagen is the most abundant protein in the body and it makes up 80% of your skin, so there’s no doubt that building more of this miracle protein will help improve the health of your skin. But how can collagen help your acne?

The primary amino acids present in collagen, namely proline, glycine lysine, and hydroxyproline are all great at reducing inflammation in your skin. Reducing inflammation can prevent new spots occurring on your skin as acne causing bacteria usually flourish in inflammatory conditions as opposed to healthy skin.

Additionally, plant-based collagen builders also contain copious amounts of zinc, a potent anti-inflammatory agent. It can help reduce irritation and redness around your pimples, reducing any pain and helping them appear smaller and less distinct on your skin (I mean if you have to suffer through a spot, I’m sure you could do without a bright red halo around it!). Zinc is also involved in wound healing and can help the rate at which your spots and your skin heal.

Everyone loves to “help” when you are suffering from acne, and the most common advice is usually – drink more water. Well, around 60% of collagen is made up of water, so building more collagen will essentially hydrate your skin and flush out toxins, bacteria and impurities from within.

For an added bonus, opt for a plant-based collagen builder like Raw Beauty Lab’s Vegan Collagen. The ingredients used in plant-based builders actually can also help increase the amount of hyaluronic acid in your skin (and I’m sure the skincare fanatics out there already know what’s coming). Hyaluronic acid is essentially a water magnet that can help plump up your skin and smoothen out the texture, making your pimples much less visible.

So, collagen can help reduce your active acne. But can collagen help with acne scars? Fortunately, the answer here is yes! Collagen supplements will have the biggest impact on getting rid of those irritating pigmented reminders that stare back at you every morning after your skin has ensued battle with the aforementioned pimple.

The pigmentation and indentations from acne takes much longer to disappear because of the damage done to the deeper layers of your skin, but this is where collagen has the most impact.

Pigmentation from acne is a result of the overproduction of melanin. Vitamin C, the precursor for collagen production, reduces the production of melanin by inhibiting the enzyme tyrosinase. Reducing melanin production will help your scars fade faster.

Topical vitamin C may be useful. However, supplementing the deepest layers of your skin where your melanocytes live, with Vitamin C and collagen, can significantly speed up the rate at which scars fade, helping you clear up your skin faster.

The indentations are caused by physical damage to your skin’s collagen, causing your skin to dip down where the spot was, producing an indentation on the surface. Building collagen can essentially help push out the indentation, helping to smoothen the surface of your skin. Collagen production also increases production of the amino acid glycine which helps hydrate and plump up your skin. Hydrated skin also a smoother surface, which can reduces the visibility of indentations on your skin.

The good news is that both the indentations and pigmentation can be targeted with a single collagen supplement that can help build and protect the deepest layers of your skin to help it recover from acne scarring as quickly as possible.

So, you know you want a collagen supplement, but the question remains, which one is the right one for you? While all collagen supplements have their benefits in helping your skin, choosing a collagen supplement that is free of any added sugars, sweeteners, flavours or preservatives – all of which have been proven to aggravate acne and make it worse - can provide you with the best results.

Animal based collagen such as bovine and marine collagen supplements consists of, well, raw animal parts (think fish skins, bovine cartilage and hides – essentially the stuff restaurants discard because you don’t want to eat it). Making these raw animal parts even remotely palatable requires excessive processing. Not to mention the cocktail of skin and gut destroying additives mixed into the recipe to stop you gagging when you try to ingest them.

Vegan collagen builders, like Raw Beauty Lab’s Vegan Collagen, are 100% plant based, clean and cruelty free. Instead of discarded animals, it consists of 9 organic superfoods that provide the complete nutrient profile (in spades might I add) to help your skin build collagen, making it the best collagen for acne scars. Plus, with no added sugars, sweeteners or additives (I mean why ruin the naturally refreshing taste of real raspberries?), there’s no risk of any adverse side effects that could possibly worsen your acne making it (in our opinion) the best collagen supplement to help your skin beat acne!

Find out more about Raw Beauty Lab’s award-winning Collagen (not to boast but the superfood supplement boasts 3 award titles and over 900 5-star reviews) below.