“GHK-Cu boosts collagen.”
It does far more than collagen — and it leans on NAD+ as fuel, which is why it tends to stall.
Calling GHK-Cu a collagen booster is accurate and almost beside the point. Gene-expression work found the copper tripeptide shifts thousands of genes in fibroblasts, nudging the cell into a coordinated repair state: collagen and elastin, yes, but also antioxidant defenses, matrix-remodeling enzymes, and a broad regenerative program. That breadth is why people report effects across skin, hair, and recovery rather than just 'firmer skin.'
Running a program that large isn't free. It costs energy and it spends cofactors, and one of the central ones is NAD+ — the molecule at the heart of cellular energy and a long list of repair enzymes. Push fibroblasts to work harder for weeks and you draw the NAD+ pool down faster than usual.
That's the most likely explanation for a pattern people hit constantly: strong early results from GHK-Cu, then a plateau somewhere around the six-week mark. The signal is still arriving; the fuel to act on it isn't keeping up. It reads like the compound 'stopped working,' but it's closer to a cell running its repair program on an empty tank.
Which is exactly why GHK-Cu and NAD+ show up together in well-built stacks. The pairing isn't a marketing bundle — it's topping up the substrate the headline compound quietly burns.
Pair GHK-Cu with NAD+ to fuel the repair program and sidestep the typical six-week plateau.