“美容圣品”胶原蛋白鸡尾酒？

所属教程:金融时报原文阅读

浏览:

2020年07月19日

手机版

扫描二维码方便学习和分享

“美容圣品”胶原蛋白鸡尾酒？

胶原蛋白一直以来都被渴望美丽的女性们视为延缓皮肤衰老的救星，被添加到各种护肤产品中。甚至伦敦一家名为Askinology的美容店向顾客出售含有胶原蛋白成分的混合饮料“鸡尾酒”。据宣传这种通过直接食用摄取胶原蛋白的方式比起简单涂抹护肤面霜更加有效，然而该产品是否真的具有美肤魔力，现在仍然未有定论。但是作为爱美的人，你会尝试吗？

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

collagen 胶原蛋白

inexorable 不可避免的

elastic 有弹性的

semblance 外表

concoction 混合物

mangle 损坏

阅读即将开始，建议您计算一下阅读整篇文章所用时间，并对照我们在文章最后给出的参考值来估算您的阅读速度。

Shaken or plumped?（871words）

By Lucy Kellaway

* * *

Face creams not keeping you young? You’re doing it wrong. Ever hopeful, Lucy Kellaway subjects herself to collagen cocktails.

So what’s it to be? A Singa Pore Skin? A Hydratini? Or a Skin on the Beach?

This is the cocktail menu at Askinology, a facial bar that recently opened in the City of London. The idea is that, while you have a punning “Plump up the Volume” facial, you drink punning cocktails based not on gin and vodka but on ageing women’s biggest white hope: collagen.

Even I, who have mostly relinquished any idea that my skin will stop its inexorable shift into a concertinaed parchment, had heard of collagen. It is the protein that holds your body together, makes bones strong and skin elastic. Alas, hit 30 and you stop producing quite so much of it, and by 50 the body’s collagen producers are working to rule.

So when I see “collagen” slapped on the side of a face-cream jar, I’m marginally more inclined to buy it — especially if it is two-for-one. For years I’ve intermittently been wiping the stuff on my skin, though I’m not sure why, as I can’t see that it has been doing me any good.

Having researched the matter, I now know what has been going wrong. Collagen particles turn out to be huge and have not a hope of penetrating my skin, which, though wrinkly, still serves its primary function extremely well — which is to keep the outside world out.

Clever beauty companies have moved on and are trying to get us to drink the stuff instead, assuring us that their scientists have broken it down into tiny predigested particles that can pass through the gut wall and reassemble themselves into a semblance of youth on the face.

As collagen tastes nasty — Askinology uses a powder made from cow skin — the sweet concoctions make it easier to swallow. In fact, its cocktails slip down so easily that, when I visited, I drank two in quick succession — one made from tropical fruit juices and a sharper one made from a mixture of Coca-Cola and lime juice. I couldn’t taste the collagen in either, which either means that the mixing was skilful or that they contain very little of the pricey magic ingredient — which is produced by Aneva Derma and costs about £110 a tin.

When I checked the manufacturer’s website, I found three things about the drink that left me anxious: the stated dose must not be exceeded; it should be drunk at night; and it comes from German cows that are free of BSE. The very idea that a new collagen drink could in theory give you a side order of mad cow disease had never occurred to me.

Aneva Derma is one of many producers of the drink, which comes variously in powder, shots and liquid capsules. All forms share two things: they cost a lot, and everyone seems to want them.

Last month, LQ Liquid Health started selling shot bottles of a marine collagen concoction; before it went on sale at Holland & Barrett, there was apparently a waiting list of 9,566 eager women — and men — longing to spend £29.99 on 10 tiny bottles containing a liquid with a peculiar taste and slightly slimy texture.

Most doctors will tell you that these drinks are snake oil. Collagen can’t pass through your intestine and, even if it could, the quantities would be too small to have any effect. However, there has been one study that suggests that it may work in a curious way. The fragments of collagen that make their way into the bloodstream trick the body into thinking that it has had some sort of accident and makes it crank up production of the protein. Given that beauty is about hope, this is enough to be going on with.

The evidence that stares back at me from the mirror is not especially encouraging but then that could be because you have to keep drinking it for a few weeks before it works. One day’s overdose isn’t enough.

For those who don’t want their collagen mangled by scientists and marketers, there is plenty around in a more natural form. Eating a boiled pig’s trotter or applying a face-pack of raw chicken skin should do the trick and, while it is unlikely to make us young, it will make us fashionable — which is the next best thing. In New York the hottest drink in the beauty world is bone broth, while in London the Broth Bar Lab pop-up café offers bone tea, which devotees swear is better than Botox. And if meat broth with a bone scone sounds daunting, it is nothing compared with what is on offer in Japan, where customers at the Yunessun Spa House in Hakone are invited to pile into a communal bath of steaming pork stock.

Which makes sipping a Singa Pore Skin at the clean Askinology clinic make all the sense in the world.

请根据你所读到的文章内容，完成以下自测题目：

1. Why did the collagen creams used by author have little effect on her skin?

a. The face creams contain little effective ingredients

b. The collagen particles are too big to be absorbed by skin

c. The author didn’t keep on using them

d. The products are poorly made

2. Which of the following is mentioned as one of the producers of the collagen drink?

a. Aneva Derma

b. USANA

c. Pfizer

d. Mary Kay