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Today we return to discuss grocery store staple brand Nature’s Bounty, and their foray into the beautysphere: Nature’s Bounty Hair, Skin & Nails gummies.
Nature’s Bounty has been around since 1971, so they’re pretty ubiquitous, although they didn’t really get on our gummy radar until fairly recently.
But their Hair, Skin & Nails gummies are apparently wildly popular, so of course we had to see what all the fuss is about.
What’s in hair, skin & nails gummies?
These gummies contain:
2,500 mcg of Biotin
15 mg of Vitamin C (17% of your DV)
6.7 mg of Vitamin E (45% of your DV)
Now, Biotin is the main event here. A storied beauty booster, it sounds a little more fancy than what it actually is: a water-soluble B vitamin.
As vitamin B7, it aids and assists in a variety of metabolic processes in your body, from breaking down fats and carbs to creating important enzymes.
While it’s fairly rare to be deficient in Biotin, adding more to your diet can create some volume and strength for your hair, skin & nails, hence the name of these gummies.
As a beauty supplement, Biotin is known as the vegan hair-volumizing ingredient that powers the now-legendary SugarBearHair, as well as the subsequent parade of influencer gummies marching behind the Sugarbear into the current gummy zeitgeist we find ourselves in.
Vitamin C can also act as a vegan collagen booster of sorts, as a building block for our body’s natural collagen production system.
And Vitamin E is a legendary skin soother, both topically and when taken internally.
The “Other Ingredients”
In Nature’s Bounty’s Stress Comfort gummy we noticed a “contains bio-engineered food ingredients” disclaimer in very fine print under the ingredients list.
This bottle does not contain that label. (Although, we’re still not sure these are the highest, non-GMO ingredients around. These gummies are not organic, nor do they have a non-GMO label, even though these are allegedly nature’s “bounty”.)
But that’s not to say that we didn’t find other noteworthy items on the label!
We did some head-scratching and soul-searching as we worked our way through the “other ingredients”.
The head-scratching came from the inclusion of gelatin (as opposed to the vegan alternative pectin).
We don’t fully understand this choice, because if you’re already using the vegetarian beauty wonder Biotin (as opposed to the non-vegetarian beauty wonder Collagen), why would you use gelatin and undermine what could be a vegetarian supplement?
Vegetarian/Vegan is all the rage these days, and a ton of brands are highlighting their vegetarian/vegan supplements. But here, we have a company using a beloved vegetarian supplement…and somehow made the decision to render it non-vegetarian.
We’re assuming it’s because Nature’s Bounty doesn’t really care, and don’t consider their audience big vegans. Maybe you don’t care either, which is totally fine.
But we at least like to highlight these things, in case you’re looking for a biotin supplement because it’s a more ethical alternative to collagen.
The real soul-searching, though, appeared when we saw that these contain “Vegetable Oil (Palm)”, which is a roundabout way of saying palm oil.
So even if boiled hoof wasn’t a concern for you, then maybe the leading cause of orangutan extinction will be?
There are possibly a few ethical, non-destructive sources of palm oil, but those companies proudly emblazon that certification on all their packaging.
If you don’t see that label, then any products with palm oil are definitely contributing to dangerous levels of deforestation across the world. And even then, recent studies say any claim of truly sustainable palm oil “is a con”.
It’s a very confusing addition, because we haven’t seen palm oil in any other gummy we’ve tried.
Nature’s Bounty indeed!
Do Nature’s Bounty Hair, Skin & Nails gummies work?
And yet, we still finished the entire bottle to see what happened when we took the Internet’s Beauty Gummy.
When we test a collagen or biotin supplement, we don’t take any other beauty supplements along with it, so we can be sure we’re only seeing the effects (or lack of effects) of that specific supplement.
And if we don’t supplement with collagen or biotin, we notice that our nails quickly get more brittle, and our hair thins out a little bit. So it’s pretty easy to tell, at least for us, if a supplement is working for us.
We aren’t gonna lie, we weren’t expecting much from these, and we didn’t get very much. We took the entire bottle, waiting for something–anything!– to happen, but instead we just watched as our nails started to break and our hair thinned again.
Personally, when we take a collagen supplement, we tend to notice results most with our nails.
And we tend to notice the most glam, full-of-life results with our hair when we take HUM’s Hair Sweet Hair biotin supplement.
HUM’s Hair Sweet Hair is honestly the only Biotin-based supplement where we have had noticeable results. Sadly, supplements like the cute vegan Pacifica also fall short with us.
We wonder if it’s because Hum Hair Sweet Hair has some incredible additional ingredients (that we haven’t seen in any other gummies!) like Fo-Ti and PABA, and that’s what our hair is really responding to.
Bottom line: Nature’s Bounty Hair Skin & Nails did nothing for us. Our nails were breaking like crazy by the end of the bottle.
Tasting Notes
These have a strangely gritty quality, which we imagined was like chewing on little animal hooves cause we knew gelatin was in here, but we obviously know that’s not how gelatin works (it actually gives a food product it’s airy pillowiness! Hello, Jello!), but we still couldn’t figure out exactly what we were tasting.
Basically, we didn’t enjoy chewing these.
These have a decent strawberry flavor, but it’s nothing to write home about.
At the End of the Day
Their bottle claims they are the “#1 Brand for Hair, Skin Nails” (as of 4/27/19), but we didn’t find these to be #1 at anything for us, except maybe cheap and weird to chew.
You get what you pay for, we guess.
We understand that vitamin gummies have enchanted the world, and Nature’s Bounty is easily accessible and pretty much ubiquitous.
But part of the reason we started this site was to highlight high quality and effective supplements, so we’re here to report that we highly recommend something else.
The best biotin gummy we’ve come across is HUM Hair Sweet Hair, which you can buy from HUM, or find on Amazon.
The best collagen gummies for nails that we’ve found are Olly’s Collagen Gummy Rings, which you can get on Amazon.
