Your collagen gave your joints the bricks. Menopause took the builders.
Think back to when it started. Odds are it lined up with your cycle changing, that's not a coincidence, that's the tell.
For 40+ years, estrogen quietly maintained the collagen in your joints, there are estrogen receptors sitting right in the tissue. It was the repair crew. When estrogen drops during menopause, that crew gets laid off: collagen breaks down faster than your body rebuilds it, the cushion thins, and the joint that served you for decades starts to ache. Not because you wore it out. Because nobody's patching it anymore.
But collagen is only a signal to rebuild, and the signal can't build a thing without its crew: vitamin C to switch the building on, copper to weld the new fibers together. Most brands leave those out. You had the bricks. You were missing the builders, which is exactly why your skin felt it and your joints didn't.
This is the wedge no competitor claims. Keep this diagram beside the mechanism copy.