Collagen is sold in grams, and grams are the one thing the front of a tub will always shout. What the front does not say is how many scoops it took to get there. Of the 26 powders we read, the serving size was two scoops on 8 of them and six tablets on another 3. People take one scoop. On more than a third of this category, one scoop is half a serving or less.
The second issue is what else is in the tub. Eleven of the 26 add something to the collagen: vitamin C, a probiotic, hyaluronic acid, sweetener, or the binders a tablet needs to hold together. None of those are harmful and none of them are collagen, and every gram they occupy is a gram you paid for at collagen prices.
Then there is the source. Nine of the 26 sell a multi-source blend, which sounds like more and reads like less: the total is printed and the grams per source never are. You cannot tell how much bovine, how much marine, how much eggshell. One formula of the 26 printed a full 20 g of hydrolyzed peptides from one named source, in one scoop, with nothing else in the tub.
Only your skin responded? Count the scoops first.Before you decide collagen does not do much, check what you actually took. If the panel says two scoops and you used one, you ran the whole trial at half the amount. Flip the tub, find the serving size, then find the grams. Those two numbers together are the only ones that matter.