There is a particular excitement that comes with buying a new skincare product. You place your bottle neatly on your bedside table. You make room for a new serum, and you promise that you’ll be sure to use it every morning, even on the mornings when you’ve hit snooze twice and your alarm and skincare fall to the back of your mind.

There is another side of a beauty routine that should be considered. One that rarely gets the same level of attention: what happens before any of those products even hit the shelves in your bathroom?

Your skin is living tissue. It is constantly responding to environmental stressors, while relying on nutritional building blocks involved in maintaining its structure and barrier.

Could nutrition become a more intentional part of the way you think about long-term skin health?

New York, Sunshine, and 300 Studies

Lily Shapiro, PharmD, MBA, headed down a path towards skin nutrition. She is a pharmacist and Wharton graduate who spent almost 15 years on Wall Street.

When she decided to move from New York to Southern California, she completely changed the way that she viewed her own skin.

The move meant more exposure to the sun, making the effects of environmental exposure more noticeable to her. Shapiro didn’t just set out to discover yet another product to add to her routine, but rather she delved deeper into the research. She reviewed around 300 studies that focused on areas such as collagen, oxidative stress, hydration, the skin barrier, pigmentation, cellular energy, and photoaging.

But the deeper Shapiro went, the more fragmented the category appeared to be.

While one supplement might focus on collagen, another might center on antioxidants, and another might contain ceramides. You can quickly find yourself knee-deep in a comprehensive daily routine that includes swallowing more than a handful of pills before your day has even begun.

Once individual ingredients begin entering the conversation, the simplicity can disappear quickly. One capsule for collagen support. Another for antioxidants. Something else for ceramides or other nutrients. What began as an attempt to support skin health can become another multi-step routine to remember.

This is where ATIKA enters the conversation. Finding a carefully researched nutrient to add to a routine can sound simple until that approach requires remembering a different pill, powder, or capsule for different purposes. The challenge isn’t necessarily finding individual ingredients. It’s creating a routine that is simple enough to maintain.

Shapiro decided to bring multiple nutritional considerations into a single formula. This approach focuses on four areas through the proprietary CALM Framework™: Collagen Integrity, Antioxidant Balance, Lipid Barrier, and Mitochondrial Function.

More Than Meets the Glass

ATIKA Advanced Skin Nutrition is a powdered drink designed to bring several aspects of skin nutrition into a single daily routine. This product is not meant to replace sunscreen, topical skincare, a balanced diet, or medical care. Instead, it serves as a complementary nutritional addition for those looking for a more consolidated approach to skin nutrition.

• Collagen Integrity: Verisol® collagen peptides, vitamin C, and silica. These ingredients provide nutrients involved in supporting the skin’s structure.
• Antioxidant Balance: Vitamin C, lutein, zeaxanthin, lycopene, grape seed, and green tea extracts. These ingredients are included as part of the formula’s approach to everyday environmental stress.

• Lipid Barrier: Ceramosides™ ceramides and MCTs. These ingredients focus on nutritional support for the skin’s outer barrier.
• Mitochondrial Function: Niacinamide, vitamin D3, zinc, and selenium. These nutrients each have established nutritional roles in normal cellular processes.

Instead of hiding the ingredients behind a proprietary blend, this formula offers the individual amounts. This is an important detail for those who have wondered how much of each ingredient is actually inside their supplements.

Collagen Isn’t Quite That Simple

Collagen has a place in the beauty landscape. It is one of the most talked about ingredients in ingestible skincare.

A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis published in Nutrients examined 26 randomized controlled trials involving 1,721 participants. The research suggests that hydrolyzed collagen supplementation may be associated with improvements in skin hydration and elasticity. The research also mentions that there are limitations and potential sources of bias, which means that additional, larger-scale trials are still needed.

Later, in 2025, a systematic review and meta-analysis looked at 10 randomized controlled trials involving 646 participants. This research reported significant improvements in skin hydration and elasticity with collagen supplementation.

It is important to remember that supplement research is hardly ever as simple as the headline makes it sound.

A 2025 meta-analysis of 23 randomized controlled trials suggests that there was an overall positive effect for collagen supplementation in a number of areas, such as hydration, elasticity, and wrinkles. However, higher-quality studies and studies without pharmaceutical-company funding did not show the same significant effects.

That doesn’t mean collagen research should be dismissed. There is promising evidence, but evidence for individual ingredients and evidence for finished products are not interchangeable.

The study focuses on the individual ingredients within the formula, not the finished product itself. This means that the ingredients research may help explain why the specific ingredient has been used, but it does not prove the results of the complete formula.

There’s More to It Than Collagen

The interesting part of the brand’s approach isn’t the powder itself. It’s the philosophy behind bringing several nutritional considerations into one routine.

Part of the appeal is practical. The powder can simply be mixed into water once a day, and its persimmon-citrus flavor makes the serving feel distinctly different from swallowing another handful of capsules. Its bright color also gives it a visual identity that feels more like a daily drink than another supplement.

Stop Adding, Start Rethinking

Modern beauty can make it tempting to keep adding more and more to a daily routine.

Maybe it’s time to start making intentional choices. This doesn’t mean that you should ditch the sunscreen, topical skincare, a balanced diet, sleep, or other everyday habits. Instead, it’s about giving nutrition a more deliberate place within the overall conversation.

Shapiro’s idea was sparked by frustration: discovering that there were a number of ingredients worth considering, but not wanting to take a roster of pills every single day. The answer was to stop looking for a magical ingredient.

Sometimes important beauty routines are not about how much you add. They are about looking at your existing routine in a new light and recognizing that healthy-looking skin involves more than what you see in the bathroom mirror. Maybe the next step in skincare doesn’t always belong on the shelf. Sometimes, it might start in a glass.