Is Collagen Halal?

Collagen has been doing the rounds, making its way into everything from serums and moisturizers through to your morning coffee – and for good reason! The promise of smoother, glowier and younger looking skin is hard to resist but you should be aware that only certain types of collagen supplements are halal.

Collagen is an animal thing, fish, cows and humans are filled with the stuff. So, it’s no surprise that most collagen supplements are derived from the skins, bones and cartilage of fish and cows. However, determining whether collagen from animal sources is halal is no easy feat and usually this information requires you to contact (or more accurately, nag) the company and establish if the proper procedures to consider the source halal were followed - not to mention, the thought of eating raw fish skins and cows’ bones doesn’t make the most appetizing case for them.

The good news is, animals are not the only source of collagen. As I mentioned earlier, humans are more than capable of making collagen – in fact, for the first 20 years of our lives, we produce buckets of the stuff! With age however, our ability to produce collagen declines (not to mention that our diet as we get older gets loaded with more salty, greasy deep-fried foods – don’t worry, I’m guilty of this too!). The combination of age and a poorer diet lacking plant based superfoods causes us to lose about 1% of all our collagen every year!

However, the 4 main ingredients required to build collagen, namely: amino acids, vitamin C, copper and zinc are available in spades in specific plant-based superfoods. While finding, preparing and individually eating these superfoods in the western world is no easy task, you can still gain all their collagen building benefits from a plant based collagen supplement.

Raw Beauty Lab’s Vegan Collagen contains all four of these ingredients to build collagen, is halal and promises visible results after just 28 days (sounds a bit too good to be true right? - But your small intestine can comprehend how to break down a raspberry as opposed to a cow bone, helping you build collagen faster.)

Not to mention, each of the superfoods are raw and therefore already broken down into the individual ingredients required by your body for collagen production, making them a cleaner (and greener) option that requires minimal processing. And if all that wasn’t enough, plant based superfoods have been studied for decades for their skin smoothening, anti-aging properties.

If I haven’t made the case enough for plant based collagen as an effective, 100% halal collagen powder that can help you build and protect your collagen, and you still wanted collagen sourced from animals, do you have any potential options?

Collagen sourced from cows may be hard to label as halal as the hides, bones and cartilage of cattle are essentially extracted to produce bovine gelatine which is then hydrolysed and dried to convert into a powder, pill or gel. In some circumstances, bovine collagen may be halal – but this is entirely dependent on how the animal was slaughtered and if the process was in line with the process followed in the Islamic faith. You can find out more here.

I briefly mentioned hydrolysed collagen above and with this term being thrown about, you may be thinking if this would be a potential halal collagen supplement. Hydrolysed collagen is essentially animal collagen that has been broken down into smaller chains of amino acids – known as collagen peptides.

Unfortunately, hydrolysed collagen would still be sourced from animals, and therefore checking how the animal was slaughtered would still apply if you wanted to know if the supplement contained halal collagen peptides.

Raw Beauty Lab has always kept people at the heart of what they do – and making clean, cruelty free collagen accessible to everyone (and they really do mean each and every one of you lovely people) was key. That’s why their award-winning Vegan Collagen supplement is free of any animal products, making it halal by default (yet another reason why cruelty free products are the way forward!).

And aside from being halal, Raw Beauty Lab’s Vegan Collagen is free from additives, sugars, sweeteners (and basically all those 17 syllable words you can never pronounce). What you get is 9 organic superfoods, scientifically proven to help you build and protect your collagen and elastin to smoothen out fine lines and unveil naturally radiant, glowing skin.

Check out why over 20,000 women swear by Vegan collagen and find out more about their results here.

Hopefully the section above shed a little light on the different options if you are following a halal diet. However, before making a commitment to your skin (and where collagen is concerned, consistency remains the key to getting the best results regardless of the source), I’d like to take a moment to briefly mention how collagen can help your skin.

Collagen is the most abundant protein in the human body and is an integral structural protein found in skin and connective tissue. However, when it comes to holistically preserving the plump dewy complexion we flaunted in our younger days (do take a moment to reminisce), collagen continues to take home the gold!

Collagen is present all over the body, making the benefits of taking a collagen supplement just as holistic - I mean name a moisturizer that when applied on your face, helps moisturize the skin on your legs, makes your hair and nails grow stronger and strengthens your joints automatically?

Taking a single scoop of Vegan Collagen everyday can help keep the skin on your face and body plump and youthful, reducing the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles and bringing out your natural glow.

But collagen also makes up an integral part of your hair and nails, helping to strengthen the root attached in the skin, reducing hair fall and brittle nails and helping you grow your own natural hair and nails long and strong.

Collagen also helps strengthen your joints as it forms part of the cartilage between your bones, reducing friction between them and keeping your joints healthy.

If all this wasn’t enough, collagen also helps keep your gut healthy and regular (if you know what I mean), improves your overall energy and essentially helps you look and feel your best.

So in summary, these are the benefits can you expect from taking a vegan collagen supplement:

Claiming so many benefits and having taken the beauty and supplement industry by storm, you’re bound to ask if you can get in on the action and wake up to the plump, radiant skin you’ve always wanted. Whether you want to decipher if animal sourced collagen is halal or just go with a no-nasties, 100% plant based collagen option that is equally good (actually scratch that - better than animal collagen if I may immodestly say so myself and you can find out why here) is entirely up to you!