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My daughter got engaged last spring, and all I could think about was the photos. Not the wedding. The photos 📸 I want to be clear, because it sounds awful — I was over the moon for her. Cried in the kitchen, rang my sister, all the proper things a mum's supposed to do. But once all that settled, the feeling that crept in and wouldn't leave me alone was something I've never admitted to a single soul. I was dreading being in the pictures 😔 I know how that sounds. What kind of mother hears her only daughter is getting married and starts fretting about how she's going to look. I was ashamed of myself for it. But I couldn't shake it, and every time another part of the day got sorted — the venue, the date, the photographer — it got a little bit worse. Because there's no hiding at a wedding. You're in the photos whether you like it or not, stood right next to the bride, and those pictures don't go in a drawer. They go on walls. In albums my daughter will still have long after I'm gone. That's how I'll be remembered, stood beside her on the best day of her life. If you'd told me then that I'd end up loving the photos from that day — that there's one on my wall now I can't walk past without stopping — I'd have laughed at you. Because for the first time in my life, I felt properly insecure about how I looked 😟 Somewhere along the way that easy confidence had gone, and the more I sat with it the worse it got. I was losing sleep, lying awake at two in the morning over a day that was still the best part of a year off. It turned into this constant low worry I'd never had before, and every so often it'd tip over into proper panic — chest tight, the lot — over what was meant to be the happiest day of our lives. I just didn't recognise the woman looking back at me in the mirror. I'm 56. It hadn't happened overnight — it had been building for a few years and I'd got very good at not looking at it head on. Tired isn't the word, because I could be well-rested and still look it. Faded, maybe. The skin round my jaw had softened and dropped. There were lines that hadn't been there before. And the whole thing had lost that bit of bounce I'd had my whole life and never once thought about — because you don't, do you, until it's gone. We don't really talk about this, women my age. We make little jokes over a glass of wine and change the subject. So you end up assuming it's just you, and everyone else is coping better. So I did what a lot of us do. I said nothing, and I started trying to fix it on the quiet. I won't tell you exactly what I spent, because I'm a bit embarrassed about it 😬 There was a day I stood at a counter in town while a girl half my age sold me a pot of serum the size of my thumb for sixty-odd pounds, promising it would "rebuild" my skin. I believed her. I wanted to believe her. I bought the night cream too, and a course of facials I booked under the heading of "treating myself" when really I was just desperate. They all ended up on a shelf in the bathroom. Little pots of hope, lined up in a row ❌ And not one of them touched the thing that was actually bothering me. They'd make my skin feel lovely for an hour, and then by teatime I'd catch myself in a window and there she'd be again — that faded, tired-looking woman who was going to be stood in every photograph at my daughter's wedding. I didn't say a word to my husband. He'd only have told me I was being daft, that I looked lovely — which is kind, and exactly why I couldn't talk to him about it. He wasn't the one who'd be in the pictures. What turned it around, of all places, was a dress shop. Me and my daughter had gone to look at outfits for me — mother-of-the-bride. She'd come along to give me a second opinion, bless her, though she spent most of it on her phone. And there was another woman in there, about my age, doing exactly what I was doing — in and out of the changing room with armfuls of things, pulling that face we all pull at ourselves in those awful mirrors. Her son was getting married. We got chatting between fittings, the way you do, and somehow we got onto how we felt about it all. And I surprised myself — I said it out loud to a total stranger. That I was dreading the photos. That I didn't feel like myself anymore. I asked her if she felt the same. And it's funny how things happen, isn't it. Of all the people to end up next to in a dress shop, she'd been exactly where I was the year before, at her son's wedding. The dread, the creams, the whole lot. After months of feeling like the only woman in the world who felt this way, here was someone who'd felt every bit of it 💕 So of course I asked her what she'd done about it, because whatever it was, I wanted it. And the funny thing was she hadn't done anything you'd think. It wasn't until a friend put her straight that she understood why none of the creams had worked. It was her collagen, she said. That was the thing that had gone — her body had near enough stopped making it when she went through the menopause, and that was what had taken the firmness out of her face. And no cream on earth could put it back, because collagen sits far too deep for anything you rub on the surface to ever reach. Those pots on my bathroom shelf, she reckoned, had been wasting my money. She'd had the very same shelf. She'd started putting the collagen back from the inside instead — through what you take, not what you rub on — and she said it changed everything. But she was firm about one thing: it really mattered which one you got, because most of them were a waste of money. She told me the one that had turned it round for her, and I wrote the name on the back of my parking ticket before I'd even stood up. Sat next to her on that stool, you'd never have known she'd lost a wink of sleep over a photograph in her life. She just looked good. The kind of good where you can't put your finger on why — you just think, ooh, she's doing something right. I couldn't stop thinking about it on the drive home. That night, instead of going up to bed, I made a hot chocolate and sat down with my phone, meaning to have a quick look. Two hours later I was still there ☕ I'd gone right down the rabbit hole — articles, forums, women on Facebook saying the exact things I'd been feeling. It was the first time in years I'd felt like someone actually understood what was happening to me. And I'm going to tell you what I found, because I couldn't believe none of us are ever told it. This collagen — turns out it's not really a skin thing at all, even though that's how it's sold to us. It's a protein, and it sits underneath your skin like scaffolding, holding the whole lot up and giving it that bounce. It's what makes young skin look young. And when you go through the menopause, your body more or less stops making it. Not slows down — stops 😳 Women lose about a third of their collagen in the first five years after the menopause. A third. That explained the speed of it, how my face had changed so fast over two or three years when I'd done nothing different. And there it was — why none of my creams had ever stood a chance. They only touch the very top layer of skin. Collagen sits far below that, deeper than any cream can reach. I'd been rubbing all those expensive lotions on the outside of a wall when the actual problem was down in the foundations. So the answer was never another cream. It was putting the collagen back from the inside. But the more I read, the clearer it got that you can't just grab any old tub — and this is where most women go wrong even when they try it. Your body isn't made of one type of collagen — there are several, and the type that firms your skin is different from the one that does your joints or your hair. So a tub with only a single source in it, which most of the cheap ones are, only ever feeds half the picture ❌ You want more than one source, so your skin gets the type it actually needs. And then the bit I'd never have known in a hundred years — collagen on its own barely absorbs. Your body can't do anything with it unless there's Vitamin C in there at the same time to switch the process on. Most brands leave it out because it costs more. So women take their collagen faithfully every morning and most of it goes straight through them. And that, apparently, is the real reason women try collagen and decide it's rubbish — they were never absorbing it in the first place ❌ So I dug out my parking ticket and looked up the name she'd given me. It's called Elavate. And it had the lot: ✅ More than one source of collagen ✅ The Vitamin C built right in ✅ A proper dose, around 8 grams — when most of the cheap ones have 2 or 3 I wasn't the only one who'd found it, either. More than 20,000 women had left it five stars ⭐ All this time, and I'd never so much as heard of it. Even then I nearly didn't order it. But it came with a 90-day money-back guarantee, so I thought — if it's like all the rest, I'll send it back and I've lost nothing. And the wedding was eight months off. If there was ever a time to give something a proper go, this was it. So I started. One scoop in my coffee every morning ☕ I'll be straight — the first few weeks, nothing. For the best part of a month I thought, here we go, money down the drain again. I came very close to stopping ⏳ The first sign wasn't even something I spotted myself. It was about week six. I'd popped round to my daughter's, and she looked at me a bit sideways and said, "Mum, you look really well — have you been somewhere nice?" 💕 I hadn't been anywhere. I went home and stood in front of the mirror, properly, not flinching the way I had for two years. And she was right. That washed-out look had gone out of my face. Not younger, exactly — just rested. Like me, but the me from a few years back. By three months in, the change round my jaw and cheeks was plain as day. That softness and dropping I'd hated had pulled back in ✨ And I caught myself, one afternoon, glancing in a shop window without that little flinch I'd had for two years. There were bits I hadn't bargained for, too. My hair, tied up, felt thicker than it had in an age. The aches I'd written off as just my age — the stiff hands, the knees on the stairs — settled down so gradually I couldn't tell you the week they stopped. I'd only started it for my face. The rest came as a bonus. And the dread I'd carried since the day she got engaged just got smaller and smaller without me noticing. I'd half expected to still be waiting on it when the day came — but by the time the wedding arrived, I felt like myself again. I won't pretend I floated about looking 30. I was 56 and I looked 56. But I looked like a well 56 — like me, on a good day. And the thing that got me was my husband, the one I'd never breathed a word of any of this to. Halfway through the day he caught my hand, looked at me a second longer than usual, and said, "You look beautiful, love. Really beautiful." He couldn't have known what it meant. But I did 💛 The photographer sent the album through a few weeks ago. There's one photo in it. Me and my daughter, just the two of us, caught laughing at something right before she walked down. I'm not posed. I'm not braced for it the way I'd been bracing myself in mirrors for two years. I'm just there, beside her, looking like I belong in the picture instead of dreading it. It's framed in the hall now, and I can't walk past it. The photograph I spent a whole year dreading turned out to be my favourite one I've got 🖼️ If you've got one of these coming — a wedding, a big birthday, a do where you'll be in every picture — or even if you haven't, even if you're just tired of catching yourself in the mirror and not quite recognising who's there — please don't do what I nearly did. It was never that I'd let myself go. It was a real thing, happening under the surface, and it could be put right. I only wish I'd known sooner. ⚠️ One fair warning — it does sell out. I got caught short once waiting on a restock, so I keep a spare in the cupboard now. If you fancy trying it, it's the same 90-day guarantee that talked me round. If it doesn't do for you what it did for me, you send it back and you're not a penny out of pocket. Just give it the full twelve weeks — it's slow to start, and then one day someone asks if you've been somewhere nice, and you'll know. 👇 The link's below. It's the one made right here in the UK 🇬🇧 More than one collagen type, with the Vitamin C built in. That's the one that matters.