Sarah Thompson

My story

I spent fifteen years working in marketing for consumer health brands. I knew how products were positioned, how claims were written, how packaging was designed to signal quality without necessarily delivering it. I thought that experience would protect me from being fooled. I was wrong.

Around 41, I started noticing changes I couldn't ignore. My skin looked less bright in the morning. Fine lines around my mouth were deepening faster than I expected. More hair in the drain than felt normal. Nails that snapped before they could grow. Nothing dramatic — just a slow, steady accumulation that my skincare routine wasn't addressing. So I did what most women in my position do: I bought collagen. Powders, capsules, gummies. I mixed them into my coffee, added them to smoothies, took them before bed. I spent well over $200 across two years and saw almost nothing.

What changed everything was a conversation with my friend Dana, a registered nutritionist I've known since college. I was venting about how useless collagen felt for me, and she stopped me: “You're probably taking the wrong type of collagen. Most brands only give you one or two types. But your body needs ten.” I had never heard that — not in fifteen years of working adjacent to the supplement industry, not in any of the brand decks I'd reviewed. It sent me down a weeks-long research spiral.

What I found explained everything. Collagen isn't a single molecule — it's a family of at least 28 structurally distinct proteins, each serving a different role in the body. The supplement industry had collapsed all of that complexity into a single word on a label. On top of that, most formulas weren't hydrolyzed for absorption, skipped Vitamin C entirely (which your body requires to synthesize collagen), and ignored gut health — the gateway through which everything you take orally actually gets absorbed. I hadn't been taking collagen wrong. I'd been sold an incomplete product.

I found a formula that addressed all three gaps: ten collagen types from four sources, fully hydrolyzed, with Vitamin C and soil-based probiotics. Within a month, a coworker asked what skincare product I had switched to. I hadn't switched anything. By month two, my hair stylist noticed the thickness. My nails were finally long enough to file. The lines around my mouth looked softer.

I built GlowAging because I'm convinced that most women who “gave up on collagen” gave up on the wrong formula — not on collagen itself. This site exists to help make that distinction clearer, one quiz at a time.