Aging with your essence intact
On collagen, travertine, and the decision not to fight time — but to move with it.
The morning light doesn't ask permission. It simply arrives.
There are objects that get better with age. The travertine I have spent years searching for, piece by piece, for my spaces has that quality. Its veins are not imperfections — they are its history, its character, proof that something was real before it arrived in your hands. The more time passes, the more something matters.
I think about that when I think about the body. The skin. What it means to care for it well.
Not from a place of fear — that exhausting place where we relate to the years as if they were an enemy to defeat. But from something closer to curation. To attention. The same discernment I bring to choosing a Kjærholm chair or a ceramic bowl: not what is trending, but what has essence. What will last. What holds its own.
"Aging with your essence is not about resisting time. It's about becoming, with greater clarity, who you always were."
My first gift to myself, every day.
The ritual
Every morning begins the same way: in stillness, in meditation. It is the first intentional act of the day — the moment I decide, before anything else arrives, to be present. Everything that follows flows differently because of it.
When I finish, I prepare my matcha. Never in a rush — that would ruin everything. I whisk it slowly, watching the foam form, allowing myself to love that unhurried process, almost meditative in itself. I pour it into that small bowl that fits perfectly between both hands. The warmth rises through my palms. Light comes in at an angle. And in that moment — repeated, simple, entirely mine — I understand that this is the first gift I give myself each day.
This is where collagen found its natural place. I dissolve it in the warm water before whisking the matcha, so it enters without disrupting anything, without adding complexity to something I love precisely for its simplicity. Formetta’s superior formulation combines bioactive collagen peptides with minerals, electrolytes and antioxidants — it doesn’t just add collagen…, it activates the body's own capacity to produce it. That matters to me. I'm not looking for a quick fix. I want my body to know how to do its own work, for longer.
"The beauty I care about is not the kind that stops the clock. It's the kind that makes you more yourself, with every passing year."
The philosophy behind it
At VV Interior Home, I have spent years curating spaces with that same logic: nothing that follows trends, because trends pass. Only objects with real history, materials that age with dignity, forms that hold meaning beyond the moment. Marble doesn't age badly — it patinas. Wood doesn't wear down — it settles. There is an enormous difference between deteriorating and evolving.
I believe the same is true of people. The question is not how to stop it, but how to move through it with integrity. With care. With the same attention you would bring to restoring a singular piece you found in a market in Milan.
Collagen, in that context, is not vanity. It is coherence. It is choosing, every morning — from the meditation, from the warm matcha between your hands — to be present in your own body with the same intention you bring to everything else.
Photography · Rabea Hüppi · rabeahueppi-fotografie.com
Product · Formetta · Superoor Collagen Formulation · formetta.com
Matcha
Ceramic: Hiroshi Aoki
Art Direction & Curation · Valeria Viollaz · VV Interior Home · Lucerne, Switzerland
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