My Instagram Explore page has morphed into a never-ending stream of dewy, glass-skinned girls making homemade gummies or jellies by mixing plain gelatin with drinkable liquids ranging from fruit juice to coffee and pouring the concoctions into cute little molds. While slurping their creations up for the camera, they earnestly explain how eating gelatin—the colorless, odorless, flavorless food ingredient derived from animal collagen—has transformed their skin from problematic to poreless. They promise that if you want skin like theirs (clear, plump, glassy, young) gelatin is the secret ingredient you’ve been waiting for. Some of these self-proclaimed skin care experts even post videos of their gelatin creations without voiceovers because they expect their homemade gummies and jellies to speak for themselves.
One by one, the Gelatin Girlies (yes, that’s what I’m calling them) are convincing people that their dewy complexions can be attributed to homemade gummies, but as I watched another perfectly filtered face proselytize the odorless and flavorless powder, I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Does eating gelatin actually do anything to your skin?” I asked the experts, and the answer: Um, probably not. Sorry, Gelatin Girlies.
To put it shortly, gelatin is what you get when you take collagen from animal skin, bones, and connective tissues and boil it down long enough to denature the proteins, according to cosmetic chemist Perry Romanowski. “What’s left is a mix of peptides and proteins that, when cooled, give you that giggly texture that you see in gummy bears or Jell-O,” he tells Allure. Most gelatin, he adds, comes from pigs and cows.
Because collagen is the main structural protein in our skin, which makes it firm and elastic, some people are treating gelatin like another popular internet fad: those collagen powders that are marketed as skin-care supplements. There seems to be a widespread belief that eating gelatin is the equivalent of eating straight-up collagen, and that ingesting collagen in any form makes skin look good. But neither of those things is necessarily true.
As Lindsey Zubritsky, MD, a board-certified dermatologist in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, explains, collagen must be hydrolyzed—meaning heated up so its protein structure breaks down—for the body to be able to break it down into amino acids, which are then absorbed by your digestive system and make their way through your body, including the skin. Though gelatin and collagen supplements are both hydrolyzed forms of collagen, chemically speaking, gelatin isn’t as broken-down as a collagen supplement would be. Plus, “[Gelatin is] more difficult to break down in the bloodstream, meaning it’s less bioavailable,” Zubritsky says.
