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The ingestible-beauty-product industry is projected to be worth £160bn by 2022.
The ingestible-beauty-product industry is projected to be worth £160bn by 2022. Composite: Getty
The ingestible-beauty-product industry is projected to be worth £160bn by 2022. Composite: Getty

Ingestible me – will putting Brain Dust in my porridge make me smarter?

This article is more than 6 years old

A range of ‘ingestible’ supplements are claimed to boost everything from your skin to your sex life. In the first of a new series on the weirdest and wildest food fads, we put them to the test

Brain Dust tastes like aspirin. It’s good to know this before putting it in a pancake, one of the breakfast suggestions on the box, because the pancake will be ruined. Brain Dust tastes marginally better mixed into a smoothie with almond butter, agave syrup and a banana, but in plain water, it’s foul. Still, the quest to look and feel generically better rumbles on, so here I am, drinking my dust.

I’m trying out “ingestibles”, wellness in a calorie-free pill or powder, which promise to do big things for your skin. Some people, such as – you guessed it – Gwyneth Paltrow, swear by eating this stuff for breakfast. I usually have coffee, a satsuma and eggs, but for the past 10 days, I’ve added 500ml of warm water containing 30ml of collagen from the Beauty Chef; a sachet of something called Clean Me, which includes powdered broccoli and wheatgrass; three pills containing various antioxidants and concentrated plant extracts; and occasionally Brain Dust, which contains something fun called lion’s mane mushroom. The manufacturers, Moon Juice, also make Sex Dust and Dream Dust, but I don’t want to get too preoccupied at work.

You are supposed drink this stuff while still using your usual creams and serums. And it’s not in lieu of breakfast, but rather aims to soup it up. Moon Dust is one of the pricier (£36 a box), wackier ones, although there are tons of pills and liquids formulated with stuff such as biotin, niacin and various mystery “extracts”.

The science behind them is hazy. Collagen, for example, is a protein, which is good for energy (something I do notice), but the idea that we can direct it towards our skin is a bit far-fetched; collagen is about as governable as a toddler. Still, the figures are good: the ingestible-beauty-products industry is projected to be worth £160bn worldwide by 2022 and lots of people (OK, mainly Gwyneth Paltrow) swear by them, so somebody’s winning.

Do they make you healthier? “Most supplements simply result in expensive pee,” says Tim Caulfield, a writer and professor of health law and science policy, who loves debunking Goop-y myths. For all I know it’s witchcraft – it’s so hard to control other variables that it’s impossible to know what is causing what.

Does it work? It’s hard to tell, especially when you’re taking them all at once. Especially if, when bored, you double-drop 60ml of collagen straight from the bottle. And especially when, eight days in and feeling the same, you mix the remaining three dusts into a cocktail and down it in one.

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