Does omega-3 help hair and skin? What the evidence says

Omega-3 turns up in a lot of beauty marketing, usually next to a photograph of very good hair. Underneath the marketing there's a real story about what these fats are doing in your skin, and a smaller but genuine body of research into what happens when people take them.

What is omega-3?

Omega-3 is a family of fats rather than a single nutrient, and three of them matter for most people.

ALA is the plant one, found in flaxseed, chia, walnuts and rapeseed oil. It's an essential fatty acid, which means your body can't make it and has to get it from food. EPA and DHA are the long-chain forms, and they're the ones your body puts to work directly. Your body can convert ALA into EPA and DHA, but it does so slowly and only in small amounts, so the practical way to get them is to eat them. [1]

The EPA and DHA in fish didn't start in the fish, either. It starts in micro-algae and works its way up the food chain from there. [1]

Does omega-3 help your hair grow?

Hair doesn't grow continuously, and that turns out to matter.

Every follicle runs a cycle with four phases: [8]

• anagen, the growth phase, and the long one. A scalp follicle can stay in it for years, which is why the hair on your head grows long and your eyebrows don't
• catagen, a short transition where growth stops
• telogen, the resting phase, where the hair sits in place doing nothing
• exogen, when that old hair is released and sheds

Your follicles are spread across all four at any moment, which is why you shed hair every day without going bald. How much hair you have on your head comes down largely to how many follicles are in anagen, and how long they stay there. [8] That's the lever, and it's what the research measures.

The follicle itself sits in your skin, and attached to almost every one is a sebaceous gland. Together they're called the pilosebaceous unit. Those glands produce sebum and supply around 90% of the lipids on the surface of your skin. [3] Sebum leaves through the hair canal and wicks up the hair shaft, which is how it reaches your scalp and the hair itself. [3] It's mostly fat: triglycerides and free fatty acids make up roughly 57% of it, wax esters around 26%, squalene around 12%. [4] The cells that make it draw their raw material from your bloodstream, and what's in your bloodstream came off your plate.

So to the study. A 2015 randomised trial followed 120 women for six months. The percentage of hairs sitting in telogen fell, the proportion of thicker anagen hairs went up, and hair density improved against the control on standardised photographs. [7] Fewer hairs resting and more hairs growing, which is exactly what the cycle predicts you'd want to move.

The participants noticed it themselves. At six months, 89.9% reported less hair loss, 86.1% an improvement in hair diameter and 87.3% in density. [7] That supplement contained omega-3 alongside omega-6 and antioxidants, so it can't tell us which of them did the work. Given where omega-3 sits in skin and sebum, it's plausible that it played a part.

Does omega-3 help your skin?

Omega-3 fats are structural. They sit in the membrane of every cell in your body, and skin cells are no exception. A cell membrane is built largely from fat, and the fats you eat change what that membrane is made of over time.

Skin has a job that depends on those membranes and the lipids packed between the cells: holding water in and keeping irritants out. Researchers measure how well it's doing that as transepidermal water loss, which is exactly what it sounds like, the rate at which water escapes through the skin.

A randomised, double-blind trial published in 2011 gave women flaxseed oil daily for twelve weeks. The supplemented group showed reduced water loss through the skin, less roughness and scaling, and better hydration and smoothness. [5] Research here is ongoing, and omega-3 may support the skin's barrier function.

On acne, a twelve-week study of men with inflammatory acne taking fish oil found acne improved in eight of the thirteen participants, stayed the same in one, and worsened in four. [6] A separate randomised, double-blind, controlled trial ran for ten weeks and found both inflammatory and non-inflammatory lesion counts fell in the supplemented groups. [10]

Does omega-3 protect your skin from the sun?

It isn't sunscreen and doesn't replace it. That's worth getting out of the way first.

What the research looks at is narrower. A 2011 review in Experimental Dermatology went as far as calling omega-3 fats photoprotective macronutrients, summarising work on how EPA and DHA affect the way skin responds to ultraviolet light. [9] That's about how your skin behaves after UV exposure, rather than about blocking it in the first place.

Does omega-3 help your nails?

There's no good evidence that omega-3 does anything for nails.

For hair and nails, the science is settled on a different set of nutrients. European food-safety scientists agree that biotin, zinc and selenium each contribute to the maintenance of normal hair, and that zinc and selenium contribute to the maintenance of normal nails. Those three are what our Hair, Skin & Nail Support Gummies are built around.

For skin, the agreed nutrient is vitamin C, which contributes to normal collagen formation for the normal function of skin. Collagen is the protein that gives skin its structure and firmness, and your body can't assemble it without vitamin C. That's why our Kind Collagen pairs plant-based collagen peptides with vitamin C and hyaluronic acid.

Where can I get omega-3?

From food first. Oily fish is the richest source of EPA and DHA: salmon, sardines, mackerel, herring, trout, pilchards. The NHS recommends at least two portions of fish a week, one of them oily, and notes that most of us aren't eating that much. [2]

For ALA, the plant sources are flaxseed and flaxseed oil, chia seeds, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, rapeseed oil, and soya foods like tofu and edamame. Some eggs, milks, yoghurts and spreads are fortified, so the label is worth a look.

If you don't eat fish, EPA and DHA are the gap, because ALA only converts into them slowly and in small amounts. Algae oil closes it directly, which is where the fish were getting theirs anyway. Ours is vegan omega-3 DHA and EPA from algae.

The bottom line

The research on omega-3 and hair, skin and nails isn't finished, and we're not going to pretend otherwise.

What these fats are doing in the meantime isn't in doubt. Omega-3 sits in the membrane of every cell you own, including the skin cells that hold water in and the follicle your hair grows from. The sebum that coats your scalp and hair is built from fatty acids your body pulls out of your bloodstream, and what's in your bloodstream came from your diet.

The benefits scientists have already agreed for omega-3 sit elsewhere in the body. DHA contributes to the maintenance of normal brain function and of normal vision, and EPA and DHA together contribute to the normal function of the heart, each at 250 mg a day.

So it's a fat your body can't make, it's structural everywhere it goes, it has three settled benefits of its own, and most people in the UK aren't getting the two portions of fish a week that would cover it. That's reason enough to keep it topped up while the evidence catches up.