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Your Liquid Collagen's Identity Problem
When a $4.78/oz collagen brand can't explain their ingredients but loves telling tales about their founder, something's wrong. Here’s what I found about liquid collagen.

TLDR: You're paying up to $4.78 per ounce for liquid collagen supplements that might boost your skin elasticity by 40% — if they contain actual collagen. But in this $9.77 billion market, some top sellers hide behind fake founders and mysterious ingredients while established brands face lawsuits for selling imitation collagen. Here's what you need to know before your next purchase.
Disclaimer: I discovered this trend using Exploding topics (I am an affiliate and a long-time fan of this tool), which has become my go-to resource for uncovering under-the-radar opportunities. While the tool doesn’t provide the research that comes with my newsletter, if you're into finding even more trends in all the fields, this tool is definitely worth a look.
Table of Contents
Liquid collagen sellers: who are they?
A search for "liquid collagen" on Amazon brings up over 1,000 results, with products targeting everyone from women and men to pets, and even special formulations for your morning coffee. Let's look closer at who's actually making these supplements, starting with Amazon's top seller.
The science behind collagen supplementation is solid — dozens and dozens of multiple double-blind studies show impressive results for everything from skin elasticity to joint health. But the liquid collagen sellers? That's a different story. After looking into the top five brands on Amazon, I found a pattern of questionable marketing, mysterious manufacturers, and concerning gaps between promises and proof. Let’s dive into it.
Zena Nutrition: Pretty promises, puzzling practices
The price of Zena Nutrition at the top of Amazon's collagen listings isn't outrageous — just $1.72 per ounce — but their marketing copy reads like someone fed "wellness buzzwords" into a computer and published whatever came out.
There are claims about "premium globally sourced ingredients" and third-party testing. After searching their website, I couldn't find a single actual test result.
I wasn’t able to find anything about the company on LinkedIn until I discovered that Zena Nutrition is actually VitaMina Labs — they just redirect vitaminalabs.com to zenanutrition.com (that’s how it works at the moment of writing).
From there I found that the company's president, Jessica Weinstein, has a solid marketing background from Reckitt and GSK. Still in a team of about 12 people, they've got marketers, social media folks, and customer service reps. What they don't have? Scientists or nutritionists. Anyone who actually knows how supplements work.
Looking at their ingredient list didn't make me feel any better. They start with Verisol Bioactive Collagen Peptides and Biotin, but then add both monk fruit and stevia (why two sweeteners?), preservatives, and something labeled only as "natural flavor." For a company advertising "organic" a lot, they sure seem fond of processed additives.
Terra ELMNT: Transparency with a but
Terra ELMNT’s liquid collagen is $1.77 per ounce. Their ingredient list looks impressive at first glance — four different collagen sources (bovine, fish, chicken bone broth, eggshell membrane), plus L-Carnitine and hyaluronic acid. And well, that might sound quite good until you start looking closer.
Despite all their talk about "zero compromises" on quality, they've packed their formula with three different sweeteners somehow. They've got cane sugar right next to sucralose, plus some mysterious "natural flavor" thrown in. Having analyzed quite a few supplement labels, this combination seems pretty odd unless taste matters more than actual effectiveness.
Their attempt at transparency gets quite strange too. Sure, they made this whole "Lab Reports" section on their website — but clicking through just shows some colorful graphics saying "tests passed."
Their LinkedIn page makes things even weirder, filled with pre-workout supplement marketing talk — "🧬Bringing you the NEW standard of Pre-workout" — while their website skips basic company information and pushes discount offers instead.
Perhaps most telling is the background of their CEO, who appears to have no prior work experience before launching this venture. Combined with their focus on aggressive marketing tactics over substantive information, ELMNT seems to exemplify a troubling trend in the liquid collagen market: lots of marketing polish, but questionable manufacturing substance.
Heivy: the curious case of diminishing transparency
When you pay $4.78 per fluid ounce — which is pretty well triple what other top sellers ask for — you'd expect to at least know what you're getting. But Heivy just puts "Liquid Collagen" on their label and that's it. No source, no type, no amount... nothing.
On their about page there’s the whole story about how they were founded in 2017 by "Stacy" — supposedly a mother of three who wanted to make collagen supplements more accessible. The same “Stacy” who also listed on their link-building materials, like this press-release. I mean when the CEO is mentioned as Stacy, no Surname, surely it makes you think. After some research, I found out that Heivy actually operates under a different name — Felicific Inc. — and "Stacy" is actually Yanru Lin, who has no background in supplements or nutrition (or anything else) whatsoever.
And the contradictions just keep piling up. For example, they say they're "a U.S. market leader in internal and external collagen beauty and wellness products," but they don't even have a LinkedIn business page. Most of their operations are running from the Philippines, not the U.S. And remember how they wanted to make supplements "accessible"? Well, they're charging four times more than their competitors. I personally will pass on this one.
Nature's Truth: Less hype, still same questions
Nature's Truth comes in at $1.12 per fluid ounce, and they're actually offering the most affordable liquid collagen of the top Amazon sellers (although cheaper doesn’t mean better). And well, they don't try to oversell it — you won't see any wild promises about miracle results, which is sort of refreshing. They're quite direct about their collagen source (Types I & III from bovine), so that's already putting them ahead of some others in terms of transparency.
But — and there's always a but — when you start looking a bit deeper, some familiar patterns start showing up. They talk about having "40 years of industry expertise," which sounds pretty impressive until you check their LinkedIn and see they've got like six employees, and they're all in sales and marketing. No scientists, no nutritionists, no quality control specialists... so you might wonder, as I did, where exactly those four decades of expertise are supposed to be coming from.
Their website is quite something too — it's like they've got a checklist of all the things customers want to hear: "premium quality ingredients," "ethical suppliers," "strict guidelines," and "random FDA audits." They've even made this whole "Non-GMO Pledge" about thorough research and testing. And that's all pretty well and good, except... There's zero proof of any of it. No test results, no audit reports, not even basic certification paperwork.
What's interesting though, is that despite all these red flags, Nature's Truth is probably way more established business compared to the first three. They at least tell you what's in their product, even if the ingredient list is still full of highly processed additions. In an industry where that qualifies as transparency, well, that's saying something about the state of things.