Reader story

There is a photograph of me from July that I still have not shown anyone. Twelve weeks later I had to stand in front of a photographer all evening.

By Helen Marsden · Wellness Review · Reader Story

Thirty years since our year left school, ninety-two of us in a function room in Leeds, and somebody had booked a photographer for the night. A friend told me what she has in her mug every morning, and why she has it instead of the coffee she used to have at eleven. This is the twelve weeks in between.

I’m fifty-two. In July my son graduated, and his girlfriend sent round about forty photographs from the day, the way everyone does now.

There is one of me on the steps outside, caught mid-sentence, not posing for it. I looked at that photograph for a long time. It wasn’t the lines. I’ve got lines, I’m fifty-two, I’ve earned them. It was that my skin looked tired in a way I didn’t recognise, my hair had gone flat against my head, and my hands holding the order of service looked like my mother’s hands.

I didn’t say anything to anybody. I just quietly didn’t share it.

Three weeks after that, the reunion invitation came round. Thirty years since our year left school. Ninety-two of us, a function room in Leeds, the second Saturday in October. Someone had already booked a photographer for the evening, which I thought was a bit much until I worked out that I’d rather that than ninety-two phones.

Twelve weeks. I counted it out on the kitchen calendar, which probably tells you everything about how I felt about that photograph from July.

What was already in my drawer, and what Denise had instead

I am not new to any of this. Over about ten years I’d bought the expensive serum twice, because obviously the first jar hadn’t been given long enough. Collagen gummies that tasted of sweets and lasted a fortnight. A green powder my sister swore by. There’s a drawer by my sink and they are all still in it, every single one part used.

Denise and I have had a coffee on a Thursday for years. She’s fifty-four, and I had genuinely spent about a year assuming she’d just got lucky, or had one of those faces, or had something done and wasn’t saying. That Thursday I asked her outright.

‘It’s not a face cream,’ she said. ‘It’s a hot chocolate.’

She showed me the bag she keeps by the kettle. Elavate, a collagen you drink, made with real cocoa. One scoop stirred into warm milk. She’s had one every morning for a year and a bit, in place of the second coffee she used to have at eleven and then complain about at midnight.

I said what I imagine most people say, which is that I’d taken things before and nothing had ever come of it.

‘I know exactly why nothing in that drawer worked. You stopped. So did I, every time. Nobody stops drinking a hot chocolate.’

That was the bit that landed. Not the ingredients, and I did read the ingredients later, the way you do at two in the morning. The bit that landed was that in ten years of trying things I had never actually finished one.

Why she told me not to buy one bag

I asked her how much I’d get through in twelve weeks, because I could already picture myself running out in week nine and deciding it hadn’t worked.

It’s a scoop a day, and a bag is about twenty scoops. So twelve weeks on my own is roughly four bags. Denise told me not to buy four.

‘Buy the big box,’ she said. ‘Running out is the thing that ends it. You’ll be back at that drawer by November.’

The biggest box they do is nine bags, which at a scoop a morning is about six months. I ordered it that evening with the reunion twelve weeks away and six months of it on the way, and for the first time it felt like a decision rather than another try.

The box Denise told me to buy

Elavate Multi Collagen Superblend, chocolate. Nine bags, the biggest box they do, which is about six months at one scoop a morning.

9 bagsThe biggest box, about six months at a scoop a morning £19.50/bag

Price checked on the Elavate site on 30 September 2026 and may change.

See the nine-bag box →

90-day money-back guarantee Free UK next-day delivery Made in the UK

Week one

For a fortnight it was just a very good hot chocolate

It came the next day. I was braced for a regime and there isn’t one. A scoop, warm milk, stir. It takes about as long as making a coffee, and it tastes like a proper hot chocolate, which I did not believe until I’d drunk one.

I started having it at seven, before anyone else was up, standing at the window with it. Then somewhere around day ten I noticed I’d stopped making the eleven o’clock coffee. Not deliberately. I just wasn’t reaching for it any more.

Nothing had changed in the mirror. Nothing at all. If you’d asked me on day fourteen whether it was doing anything I’d have said no, and if I hadn’t had six months of it sitting in the cupboard I think that is exactly where I would have stopped, the way I stopped with everything else.

Week four

The morning I stopped in front of the mirror

It was a Tuesday. I was doing my hair with my mind somewhere else entirely, and I stopped.

I want to be careful here, because I’ve read enough of these articles to know how they usually go. Nothing dramatic happened. There was no before and after. What happened is that I looked at myself for a second longer than I needed to and thought, that looks better than it did.

Then I did what everybody does and went looking for what else it might have been. More sleep? Not particularly. Better weather? It was August, in Yorkshire. I decided I was imagining it and got on with the day.

Week eight

My sister got there before I said anything

Karen came for the weekend in September. We were washing up on the Sunday and she took hold of my hand, turned it over, and looked at my nails.

They’d been splitting across the corners for years. I’d stopped growing them and stopped mentioning it. I hadn’t noticed they’d stopped doing it, which I think is how these things actually go: you don’t notice a thing stopping, you only notice somebody else noticing.

‘What are you doing?’ she said.

‘I’m not doing anything.’

‘Helen.’

So I told her about the hot chocolate, and she made me write it down on the back of an envelope before she got in the car.

The second Saturday in October

Ninety-two of us and one photographer

I went. I wore the green thing I’d been saving. Denise came, because she was in our year too. She is the reason I was drinking it at all.

The photographs went up in the group on the Monday, all four hundred of them, and I did the thing I always do, which is scroll fast and hope. There’s one of me and Denise by the window, mid-laugh, nobody posing.

I didn’t scroll past it.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you a hot chocolate turned me back into twenty-two. I’m fifty-two and I look fifty-two, and I’d rather look fifty-two than look like I’m pretending not to. What I’ll tell you is that twelve weeks of one small thing, every single morning, is the only thing in ten years I actually finished, and that I liked the photograph.

Five months on

I’m on the last two bags

Seven bags down, two to go, and I’ve already ordered the next box. Not because of the reunion, which was back in October, but because I like it at seven in the morning and I’d miss it.

Karen has been on it since the envelope. Denise, needless to say, has said nothing about it at all, which from Denise is gloating.