5 Reasons Why Women Over 50 Are Adding Copper to Their Collagen

#1 Your Collagen Finally Has Something to Work With

She is 61 and she had been in my chair every five weeks for nine years. In February she mentioned she had stopped buying collagen.

I asked her why, because I had put two scoops of it in a shaker bottle that morning.

She said her daughter in law had printed something out for her. She had it folded in her purse. She let me keep it.

I read it at the front desk between clients. Then I read it again that night. Then twice more that week, because I did not want it to be true.

Collagen is not a finished material. It shows up in you as loose strands, and loose strands hold nothing up. Your body has to weave those strands together and lock them in place, or they are just protein sitting around.

The tool it uses to do the weaving is an enzyme called lysyl oxidase.

And lysyl oxidase does not work without copper at the center of it.

No copper, no weaving. The strands stay loose.

So you can drink the expensive kind every morning for three years. If the crew that installs it never shows up, you are buying bricks and paying to store them.

That is not a theory somebody invented last year to sell something. It is the plain chemistry of how the material gets built, and it has been sitting in the literature for decades.

And the reason it never came up is not some big conspiracy. It is much simpler than that. Nobody in the collagen business sells copper.

#2 It Explains Why It Started Exactly When It Did

Here is the question I could not put down, because it turned out to have an answer.

If copper matters this much, why was I fine at 45 and bracing myself on the counter at 54?

Your copper is not a fixed number. In women it moves with estrogen.

When estrogen comes down at menopause, copper in the blood comes down with it. Line women up before and after and the difference is measurable. Put a woman on estrogen therapy and it goes back up.

So the exact decade the scaffolding gets harder to maintain is the exact decade the mineral that maintains it starts leaving.

I spent four years thinking I was watching myself get old. What I was actually watching was one supply line closing.

And you already know your own version of this.

You know what your hands are like for the first twenty minutes of the day. You know which jar you do not even attempt anymore. You know you have started using two hands for things you used to do with one, and if you sat still for a second, you could probably name the year that started.

That year is not a coincidence.

#3 The Two O'Clock Wall

Now the part I had never once connected to any of it.

For two years I hit a wall every afternoon around two. Not sleepy. Heavy. Like somebody had quietly turned up the resistance on everything.

I blamed the schedule. Standing all day. Being 58. Too much coffee. Not enough coffee.

Copper does not only build the scaffolding. It also runs the final step of how your cells make energy. The last enzyme in that chain, the one that actually closes the deal, is built around copper.

When copper runs short, that chain runs slow. Every cell in you does a little less, with a little more effort.

Nobody sells you anything for that, because there is no word for it. You do not get a diagnosis at two in the afternoon. You just have a body doing everything uphill.

I am not going to tell you what happened to my afternoons. I will tell you that two years ago I stopped booking my hardest client after lunch, and this spring I put her back.

#4 The Repair Crew You Already Own

Your body makes its own antioxidant enzyme. It is the one that mops up the ordinary daily damage that has everything aching by evening.

It is called superoxide dismutase, and copper sits at the core of it.

It slows down as you get older. And it slows down faster when the mineral it is built out of is running short.

So count them up. Structure. Energy. Repair. Three separate systems, three completely different jobs, one mineral.

Which is exactly where I got stuck. Because my next move was the obvious one, and it was wrong.

I drove to the pharmacy and bought a bottle of copper capsules for eleven dollars.

#5 Why It Goes On Your Wrist and Not In Your Stomach

Eleven dollars. That was my entire plan.

Here is the problem with the bottle. A capsule is a spike. It goes in all at once, your body deals with it over a few hours, and copper is not a mineral you want to be casually guessing at from a jar on your kitchen counter. There is a ceiling on it. I am a hairdresser, not a chemist.

Skin does not work that way.

Copper dissolves in human sweat. That is not a marketing line, it is a property of the metal, and it is the reason people have been putting this particular metal against their skin for about five thousand years.

Contact does the work. Slowly, steadily, all day, at the pace your own skin takes it, while you do absolutely nothing.

Which brings me to the part I did not expect to care about and now talk about the most.

There is nothing to swallow. Nothing to time with food. Nothing to remember at nine at night when you are already in bed. Nothing to run out of on a Sunday.

You put it on and you forget it. You shower in it. You garden in it. You sleep in it.

After three years of measuring scoops into a shaker bottle at six in the morning, that part alone would have been worth it.

Why Prescott Stands Out

I want to be honest about something, because it nearly stopped me buying anything at all.

I had already owned three copper bracelets. A mall kiosk. Something online. A gift shop on a trip years ago. Every one of them was in my bathroom drawer inside a month, because they did nothing and two of them had gone black.

So before I spent another dollar I took the little magnet off my station, the one I keep for bobby pins, and I went home and opened that drawer.

Two of them jumped straight to it.

Copper is not magnetic. If a magnet grabs it, there is steel underneath. A cheap core with a copper colored coat sprayed over the top, and the coat wears through. That is the black.

The third one did not stick, and that one taught me more than the other two did. I put it flat in my palm. It weighed nothing. It had the heft of a pull tab off a soda can. Passing a magnet does not make something solid copper. It only rules out one of the ways you can be lied to.

I had bought three fakes and then spent four years blaming copper.

Prescott was the only one that answered the question in plain language. Solid copper the whole way through, not a coat over something cheaper, made and finished in a New York workshop that has been running since 1964.

And then they put something in writing that I will show you in a minute, because it is not a sentence anybody writes unless they know exactly what their metal is.

Special Offer for Our Readers

There is a sale running on these right now, which is the reason I am writing this down instead of just telling the forty women who sit in my chair every week.

Two things I would want somebody to tell me, if I were the one reading this.

If you are only getting one, get the bracelet. That is what I would say if you were in my chair. It rides on the inside of the wrist, which is thin skin and warm, it is the piece you will actually keep on, and it is where most women start.

Shipping is free inside the US. Mine was on my kitchen counter in two days.

And whatever the sale is doing, that part does not change. Every piece is solid copper the whole way through, made and finished in the same New York workshop since 1964, not a coating sprayed over something cheaper.

Here's What to Do Now:

1. Tap the button below to see what is still in the sale.
2. Pick your piece. If you are undecided, start with the bracelet.
3. Order while the sale is still running. Free US shipping, one to three days.

Don't Spend Another Year Buying Bricks

If you keep doing exactly what you are doing right now, next spring is going to look like last spring.

I know that, because I did it three years running and I have the receipts.

And the money is not even the part that gets me anymore. Four thousand one hundred dollars is a number on a piece of paper. What I actually paid was two years of standing at that sink at seven in the morning, running hot water over my hands until I could close them around my shears, and letting my girls go on thinking I was washing up.

That is what the bricks cost me. Not the four thousand.

I am not going to sit here and promise you it will do for you what it did for me. I do not know your hands.

What I will tell you is that I bought the same thing every month for three years and never once asked what my body was supposed to weave it in with, because nobody selling it to me had any reason to bring it up.

Well, now somebody has.

And you get thirty mornings to find out. If morning thirty one is no different, you send one email and you are exactly where you started, which is more than I can say for the three years.

Mine has not come off my wrist since April.