Is taking collagen a waste of your time and money?
The Emma Guns Show
Emma Gunavardhana
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 22 February 2026
⏱️ 70 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The question I think I'm asked most when it comes to beauty these days is, 'should I be taking collagen?' It sells a good story, doesn't it? Take this daily supplement and all that collagen and youthfulness we're told starts to deteriorate after we hit 30, will be topped up and wrinkles, jowls and sagging will have a much harder time showing up on your skin.
It's all great but where's the proof? Just because we begin to lose our collagen stores as we age, doesn't mean eating or drinking collagen will do the job we think it will. In fact, whenever I have been asked whether collagen is something worth taking, my response has been 'it can't do any harm, but no derm I've spoken to says there's a direct and proven link so, for me, the jury's out'.
Until now...
In this episode, I chat with Maxine Laceby from Absolute Collagen who took a big risk by putting collagen through a gold standard double blind placebo clinical trial. A trial where neither the participants or the researchers know who is receiving the active treatment versus an inactive placebo.
This kind of trial is accepted by medicine as objective scientific methodology that produces knowledge untainted by bias. Essentially, if the trial had said there was no proof of collagen's efficacy, Maxine would have completely torpedoed her brand. However, the results were compelling and she details them in this episode.
We also discuss the newest collagen she has created, Pro Sculpt, designed specifically for people on a 'rapid weight loss journey' in the era of GLP-1s but, as you'll hear, it seems to me that this particular collagen is as relevant to someone on a strength training/body recomp journey as much as it is for people using weight loss jabs.
Let me know what you think. Have you been taking collagen in the 'hope' it works and has this conversation convinced you that your money has been well spent, or are you now going to bite the bullet and try collagen to see if you can notice the difference?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, hi and welcome to another episode of the Emma Gunn Show. And in a slight change, |
| 0:13.7 | you will not be hearing about my fitness and nutrition this week. Maybe there's a small |
| 0:18.7 | round of applause going on somewhere in the world, |
| 0:27.3 | but instead what you are hopefully going to enjoy is my conversation with Maxine Laceby from Absolute Collagen. Now, if you follow me on Instagram, if you follow me indeed here, you will |
| 0:33.6 | know that when the subject of collagen has come up, I have always been reticent to say, |
| 0:39.4 | yes, great, brilliant, well, yeah, absolutely, you should invest, you should try it. |
| 0:43.1 | Simply because there has been limited data on its benefits and nothing compelling enough to make me say, |
| 0:50.6 | you know what, I should encourage people to buy this because we all work hard for our |
| 0:54.9 | money and I will get no joy out of directing you to spend it irresponsibly or for no good |
| 1:00.3 | reason. So there had been rumblings, I would say about six to eight months ago, I'd been chatting |
| 1:06.7 | to my learned friend Claire Coleman, the forensic beauty journalist, and she had said, |
| 1:11.3 | oh, hold fire, there is some interesting data coming. And I think at the time she couldn't tell |
| 1:16.0 | me where from or who buy, because whether she'd signed an NDA or something. However, it turns out |
| 1:21.3 | that the double-blind placebo trials, the gold standard trial that had been done to establish collagen efficacy |
| 1:30.0 | on skin, hair, nails, etc., was commissioned by Absolute Collegent and Maxine Lacey. |
| 1:36.5 | And so I thought that it would be a really good time to sit with her and have a conversation |
| 1:40.6 | parallel to all of that. |
| 1:42.1 | This all came about because my friend Kelly does the PR |
| 1:45.7 | for Absolute Collagen and we were having a catch-up and we were talking about GLP-1s and she was |
| 1:50.6 | talking about Maxine who has been taking GLP1 and how she has actually created a specific |
| 1:57.3 | variant of Absolute Collegin called ProScul sculpt in order to support those people who |
| 2:04.1 | are going through a rapid weight loss journey or a weight loss journey. And I said, well, listen, |
... |
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