Inner Study: Philippa May, On Collagen Banking
A correction, of sorts, on the wellness world's newest favourite phrase and what years of sun-worship taught me about spending what you can't get back.
Words by Philippa May
There's a phrase moving through wellness conversations at the moment that I find myself wanting to gently put down before it takes hold: collagen banking. It's a good phrase, as far as marketing goes. Tidy, optimistic, the kind of thing that makes a habit sound like a savings account. The trouble is that it isn't quite true.
You cannot bank collagen, not in the way the word implies. You cannot store it up against future need the way you might store money, any more than you can bank a night's sleep ahead of a baby's arrival and wake up rested for the year that follows. Sleep doesn't work that way.¹ Neither does this.
What you can do, and this is the part worth getting right, is spend less of it.
Every face carries a kind of ledger, written in sun exposure and stress and the small daily insults we rarely think to count: pollution on the walk to work, the extra glass of wine, the year we didn't sleep properly. None of it announces itself as collagen loss. It simply accumulates, the way debt does, quietly, until one day the bill arrives in the mirror.
I wish someone had explained this to me at twenty-three, when I treated a beach holiday as a personal achievement and a tan as its proof. I have spent the years since paying gently for that, the way most of us in our generation do.
So if banking is the wrong metaphor, here is the truer one: preservation. The earlier you start protecting what you have, rather than waiting to repair what you've lost, the less repair there ever needs to be. Stay out of the sun more than you're in it. Let the cigarette or vape go, if you haven't already. Cover up against the pollution you can't avoid breathing. Find a way to carry stress that doesn't ask your skin to carry it too, easier said than done, possibly the hardest item on this list. And quietly, alongside all of it, give the body something to build with, which is part of why Nectar 01 is formulated around the co-factors that help new collagen form, rather than asking the body to manage it entirely on its own. Each of these slows the spend. None of them, alone, is dramatic. Together, over years, they are the difference between collagen lost and collagen kept.
None of this is an argument for restraint as a way of life, I should say clearly. I still drink the margarita. I still run outdoors in the sun, often along roads with more traffic than trees. I have no intention of giving up the things that make an ordinary life feel like a life worth having. The aim was never deprivation, it was balance: spending consciously rather than carelessly, investing in return for what you draw down.
If you are in your twenties reading this, take the trend seriously, even if the term itself deserves some scepticism. Collagen banking, properly understood, simply means starting the work of preservation before the loss is visible. Supporting production early, protecting it consistently, rather than waiting for the evidence to appear and then trying to undo it. It is, in the truest sense, an investment: the kind that compounds quietly, and that you only fully appreciate decades from now.
And if you are past thirty and wondering whether you've missed the window, you haven't. The arithmetic changes slightly, the urgency increases a little, but the principle holds exactly the same. Start today, simply because today is earlier than tomorrow.
What I want to leave you with isn't a routine, or a rule, or even really a recommendation. It's a single shift in how you think about the question itself: stop asking how to bank what you can't store, and start asking how to spend less of what you can't replace. The terminology will keep changing. Wellness culture moves through phrases the way fashion moves through hemlines, but the body underneath it doesn't care what we call it. It only knows what we've done for it, or failed to.
