The fish collagen applied on the skin does NOT adhere miraculously to our collagen fibrils. Nor does it penetrate the skin in whole form, nor does it reach the interior of the fibroblasts.
It immediately enriches the extracellular matrix of all the layers of the skin with amino acids, which causes an, as of yet clinically undefined mechanism, facilitating fibroblast activity. At the same time increasing the organism’s production of its own collagen.
Natural Collagen is a biologically active tertiary collagen - still posessing a triple helix structure which looks very similar to our DNA spiral. It is exactly the same as when it was on a living fish. No one has ever managed to achieve what Polish biochemists did - to sustain this "live" form of collagen and lock it in the glass bottle. It is extremely fragile and sensitive to temperature (preserves its properties in temperature between 5-28°C ).
So when it leaves its sterile environment (a glass bottle) and when it's applied onto your warm wet skin (which temperature as we know is much higher than 28°C ), the fragile triple helix spiral breaks down into smaller components: amino acids and peptides. These tiny elements can easily penetrate our skin and they reach into its deeper layers where the cells producing collagen are. Those cells (fibroblasts, chondrocytes) now have "extra" components which they can use to create collagen. That's all.
Beauty lies in simplicity!
HOW DOES NATURAL COLLAGEN WORK?
Now to compare with, let's look closer at the so called "bovine" collagen and see how this kind of collagen works.
"Bovine" collagen is a fibre of pentanary insoluble collagen cut from the nape of young cattle. This protein has such a large molecular mass, that it really has no chance to penetrate the barrier of the stratum corneum other than by invasive sclerotherapy, for which fragments of these fibres are used. The implants of bovine collagen fibres integrate in approx. 92% of patients and degrade after approx seven months. In a highly shredded form bovine fibres are also used to produce protein hydrolysates. This is a biologically inactive emulsifier because it is only a pulp of fragments cut from peptide chains and used as a filler in diet supplements or as a component in cosmetics. It creates a water retaining “film” on the surface of the skin.
Bovine collagen does not make its way through the epidermis, it is biologically dead and is suspected of transmitting BSE. By the end of the 20th century it had lost its good reputation among cosmetologists.