Bone Broth and Skin Health: An Honest Look at What the Science Actually Says

So, let's talk about bone broth and skin.

If you've spent any time in the wellness corner of the internet, you've seen the claims. Drink bone broth, glow from within. Collagen for plumper skin, fewer wrinkles, the radiance of your 22-year-old self. It's a tidy story. It also happens to be one of the more oversimplified stories in modern supplement marketing.

I've been wanting to dig into this one for a while because it's a topic where the honest answer is more interesting than the marketing answer. The mechanism is real. The amino acids in bone broth genuinely participate in how your body builds and maintains skin. But the leap from "these molecules exist in bone broth" to "drink this and your skin will glow" has a lot of nuance in between… and most articles in this space gloss right over it.

Let's actually look at what's going on. We'll get into the biology of how skin is built, what the research does and doesn't show, and what bone broth realistically can and can't do for your skin (spoiler: it's a more honest, mechanism-based story than the influencer version, but it's not nothing either).

How your skin is actually built

Skin is roughly 80% collagen by dry weight, which makes it the most collagen-dense organ in your body (yes, skin is an organ). Specifically, type I collagen, which makes up about 90% of total skin collagen and is what gives skin its tensile strength and structural integrity (Pu et al., 2023).

Sitting alongside collagen is a network of elastin fibers (which give skin its springiness, hence the name) and hyaluronic acid (a glycosaminoglycan that holds water like a sponge and keeps skin hydrated). Together, these three components do most of the work of making skin look and feel like skin.

The cells responsible for building this whole structural matrix are called fibroblasts. They sit in the dermis (the layer beneath the surface) and use amino acids from your diet to build new collagen and elastin, while also producing hyaluronic acid. Fibroblasts are essentially the construction crew, and amino acids are their raw materials.

Here's the part that matters: collagen is built primarily from three amino acids. Glycine, proline, and hydroxyproline. These make up roughly 50% of collagen by mass, and you can't build collagen without them. Glycine in particular shows up every third position in the collagen helix, which is why the protein has its distinctive triple-strand structure (Pu et al., 2023).

As we age, two things happen. Fibroblast activity declines, meaning the construction crew slows down. And dietary intake of these specific amino acids tends to be low in modern Western diets (we eat a lot of muscle meat and almost no connective tissue, which is where glycine, proline, and hydroxyproline are concentrated). So you have less of the raw material (glycine, proline, hydroxyproline) AND less of the workforce (fibroblasts). Skin gets thinner, less elastic, more wrinkled.

This is where bone broth comes into the picture. Bone broth is essentially a slow-cooked extraction of connective tissue, which means it's naturally rich in exactly the amino acids that collagen needs. The logic seems clean: drink the broth, supply the raw materials, support the construction. Right?

Well… sort of. This is where things get more interesting.

What the research actually shows (and what it doesn't)

There's a tendency in the supplement world to wave at "studies" without actually reading them, so let's look at what the literature looks like when you do.

The single best paper on this topic is a 2023 meta-analysis of 26 randomized controlled trials involving 1,721 participants (Pu et al., 2023). It looked at oral collagen supplementation and skin outcomes, and found statistically significant improvements in both skin hydration and skin elasticity in supplemented groups compared to placebo. The effect sizes were moderate (SMD ~0.63 for hydration, ~0.72 for elasticity). Longer-term use (>8 weeks) showed more favorable effects than short-term use. The mechanism is plausible: studies have detected collagen-derived peptides like glycine-proline-hydroxyproline (Gly-Pro-Hyp) in the bloodstream within an hour of oral ingestion, and have shown these peptides accumulating in skin tissue in animal models.

So far so good for the "collagen works" camp. But here is where it gets… complicated.

A 2025 meta-analysis published in the American Journal of Medicine looked at 23 RCTs with 1,474 participants and did something that nobody else had bothered to do: they separated the results by funding source and study quality (Lee et al., 2025). What they found is uncomfortable for the industry. When they looked only at studies not funded by pharmaceutical or supplement companies, the effect of collagen on skin hydration, elasticity, and wrinkles disappeared. When they looked only at high-quality studies (using rigorous bias-reduction methods), the effect also disappeared. The positive results were largely coming from lower-quality, industry-funded trials.

That doesn't mean the supplement doesn't work. It means the strongest evidence we have for clinical skin outcomes comes from studies with significant methodological limitations and conflicts of interest. The mechanism is still solid. The clinical proof is shakier than the marketing implies.

Harvard Medical School's own write-up on this is refreshingly direct. Their dermatologists note that while some studies show modest improvements, the trials usually use commercial blends that contain other active ingredients (vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, coenzyme Q10, etc.), making it impossible to attribute results specifically to the collagen. They also point out, importantly, that no human studies have clearly demonstrated that orally consumed collagen ends up specifically in your skin (Harvard Health, 2023). Once digested, the amino acids enter the body's general pool and your body decides where to send them. Thankfully, Farmalogical supplies some of these cofactors.

And here's the kicker for bone broth specifically: nearly all of the research above is on hydrolyzed collagen peptides, not bone broth. There is essentially no high-quality RCT data on bone broth as a stand-alone intervention for skin. A 2019 study in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism directly tested commercial and home-prepared bone broth samples for amino acid content and found that they delivered significantly lower concentrations of glycine, proline, and hydroxyproline compared to standard supplemental collagen, with huge variability between recipes (Alcock et al., 2019). Commercial bone broths (the shelf-stable kind from grocery stores) were even lower than home-cooked. The authors concluded that bone broth was unlikely to provide a reliable source of collagen precursors at research-relevant doses.

So where does this leave us?

The "loading the dice" framework

Here's where I want to get honest with you, because I think the honest version of this story is more useful than the marketing version.

When you drink bone broth (or take a collagen supplement, for that matter), you are not guaranteeing that your skin will improve. You are not directly delivering collagen to your face. What you're actually doing is something more humble, but still meaningful: you're increasing the availability of certain amino acids in your body's general amino acid pool.

What happens next is largely outside your control.

Your body, in its wisdom, will direct those amino acids wherever it decides they're needed most. Maybe that's your skin (if the fibroblasts there are calling for raw materials). Maybe it's your gut lining (which is also built on a collagen scaffold — more on this topic in another blog). Maybe it's the connective tissue around a joint you've been stressing. Maybe it's a blood vessel that needs repair, or scar tissue from an old injury, or a tendon that's recovering from training. The body doesn't consult you on the allocation.

What you're doing, essentially, is loading the dice. You're providing the inputs that make it more likely that the body has what it needs for the reconstruction projects it wants to do. You're not picking which project gets done. You're just making sure the warehouse is stocked and the construction team is supplied.

That's a more honest framing than "drink this and your skin will glow." And it also happens to be more useful, because it sets realistic expectations and reframes the value proposition. You're not paying for guaranteed cosmetic outcomes. You're paying for substrate availability. The body still gets the final say.

(Side note: this is also a defensible reason to take bone broth even if the clinical skin data is messy. If you're generally low on glycine, proline, and hydroxyproline (and most modern eaters are) then supplying them is a reasonable nutritional choice regardless of whether you can see the effect in your face. The amino acids do work elsewhere even if they don't end up where you hoped.)

So what about Farmalogical specifically?

Quick context: Farmalogical Regenerative Bone Broth is built specifically to address the Alcock 2019 problem.

Each serving contains 13g of grass-fed New Zealand beef bone broth, freeze-dried and concentrated (not the watery, variable stovetop variety the paper criticized). Plus 1.5g of organ blend and another 500mg of protein from the other ingredients. That bone broth content delivers roughly 3-3.5g of glycine, proline, and hydroxyproline per serving, which puts you in the same dosing neighborhood as the collagen peptide trials that did show effects (most used 2.5-10g).

Is that enough to guarantee glowing skin? Honestly, no. We just walked through the literature together, and nobody can guarantee that. What it does mean is that you're getting a research-relevant dose of the right amino acids, from a sourcing chain that's actually traceable, in a format that doesn't spoil after three days in the fridge. The dice are loaded as well as they can reasonably be loaded with a whole-food source. What happens next is up to your body.

The honest close

I don't love the way this category gets marketed, and I've tried to write this piece in a way that respects your ability to think for yourself. Surely there are people out there who will drink bone broth for six months and notice their skin looks better. Surely there are others who won't notice anything at all. Both responses are consistent with the literature.

What I can tell you with confidence is this:

The mechanism is real. The amino acids in bone broth are genuinely involved in how your body builds and maintains skin. The clinical evidence is more modest than the marketing suggests, and almost entirely on collagen peptides rather than bone broth itself. The honest framing is that you're increasing the odds, not buying an outcome. You are effectively stocking the warehouse with an excess of building blocks for your workers to build with.

That feels like a more honest place to land. And honestly, we think that's a better story anyway. You're not waiting on a miracle ingredient to fix your skin. You're stacking the right inputs, building the right foundation, and giving your body what it needs to do its job. That's a pretty good place to be.

References

1. Pu SY, Huang YL, Pu CM, et al. Effects of Oral Collagen for Skin Anti-Aging: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Nutrients. 2023;15(9):2080. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10180699/

2. Lee J, et al. Effects of Collagen Supplements on Skin Aging: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials. The American Journal of Medicine. 2025;138(9). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0002934325002839

3. Alcock RD, Shaw GC, Burke LM. Bone Broth Unlikely to Provide Reliable Concentrations of Collagen Precursors Compared With Supplemental Sources of Collagen Used in Collagen Research. International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism. 2019;29(3):265-272. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29893587/

4. Al-Atif H. Collagen Supplements for Aging and Wrinkles: A Paradigm Shift in the Fields of Dermatology and Cosmetics. Dermatology Practical & Conceptual. 2022;12(1):e2022018. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8824545/

5. Patel P, Senna MM. Considering collagen drinks and supplements? Harvard Health Publishing. April 12, 2023. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/considering-collagen-drinks-and-supplements-202304122911

6. Can Bone Broth Give You Glowing Skin? Beauty by Buford. December 28, 2017. https://beautybybuford.com/blog/can-bone-broth-give-glowing-skin/
   

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   About the Author

   David Battisti, MScN

   David handles all things science at Farmalogical, research, content, and everything in between. He holds a Master of Science in Nutrition from NUNM (National University of Natural Medicine), one of the leading naturopathic institutions in the country, and has been working in health and wellness for over a decade.

   David came to nutrition the way most people do — through his own body. As a lifelong athlete competing in soccer, sprinting, ultra trail running, and bouldering, his interest in nutrition grew from a desire to optimize performance while managing chronic asthma and allergies. That personal context shapes the way he writes about supplements: mechanism-first, evidence-honest, and without the hype.

   David has worked in the health and wellness industry for over a decade, has worked with brands including Keto Brainz and has helped numerous clients reach their nutrition goals through private practice.