Daily Mail journalists independently select and curate the products featured on our site. If you buy through links on this page, we may earn a commission – learn more

Backed by more than one million customers and 69,000 five-star reviews across its product range, Collagen Co. has become a standout name in Australian wellness.

Best known for its bestselling collagen meal replacement shakes, the brand has expanded its lineup to include in-demand greens powders, collagen peptides, and hydrating electrolyte sachets.

Its newest launch, V Life, supplements, is focused on supporting women’s health and helping customers feel strong, balanced and radiant. Two of the range’s early favourites, Luna V Hormonal Support and Flaura V Gut Repair & Debloat, have been selling fast, with two additional products recently joining the collection.

Body V Tone & Energy is a daily metabolic support supplement formulated to help ease tiredness and fatigue, support healthy blood sugar levels in healthy people, assist with managing sugar cravings, and support healthy body fat and muscle composition when used alongside a balanced diet and regular physical activity.

Beauty V Hair, Skin & Nails offers daily support for healthy hair growth, hair thickness, skin hydration and elasticity, and stronger, healthier nails.

To celebrate the launch, Collagen Co. is offering shoppers 20 per cent off the full V Life range for a limited time.

Since launching in July, both Luna V and Flaura V are attracting five-star reviews from customers.

‘These save my sanity going through menopause!’ one happy customer wrote of Luna V online. ‘I’m sleeping so much better and night sweats and hot flushes are all but gone. Highly recommended!’

A Flaura V purchaser raved that: ‘this product it’s a life saver. Absolutely incredible,’ adding: ‘The best I’ve ever used!!!’

Formulated with 14 active ingredients, Body V is designed to assist in the maintenance of a healthy body weight, support healthy blood sugar levels in healthy individuals, assist in the management of sugar cravings, and support healthy body fat and muscle composition when combined with a healthy diet and physical activity.

The ingredients list includes Chromium, which assists in the management of sugar cravings while helping maintain healthy blood sugar levels, and White Mulberry, which helps maintain healthy blood sugar and glucose levels after eating in healthy individuals.

It contains Morosil, a clinically studied blood orange extract that helps support healthy body weight and healthy body fat and muscle composition when combined with a reduced-calorie diet and increased physical activity.

Panax Ginseng is traditionally used to relieve tiredness, weariness and fatigue and support vitality, while B vitamins support energy production, alongside Magnesium, L-Carnitine and Alpha-Lipoic Acid for additional metabolic and energy support.

Beauty V boasts 13 clinically studied vitamins, minerals and botanical extracts to support healthy hair, skin and nails.

Saw Palmetto and Ceramosides help support scalp and hair follicle health while promoting healthy hair growth and thickness. Ceramosides and Vitamin C support skin hydration, elasticity and firmness and general skin health. Biotin, Zinc and Selenium work together to help reduce nail brittleness and support nail strength and health.

All of the V Life products are made in Australia with clinically studied ingredients and formulations free from gluten, peanut, dairy and soy.

Shoppers can enjoy a 20 per cent discount on the range, reducing the price of one jar to $52, or take advantage of a value bundle, combining other best-selling products from the Collagen Co. collection.

The Weight Loss Kick Starter pack includes two Glow Shakes of your choice, Body V, and a shaker for $184.

The Hair & Skin Duo combines Beauty V with your choice of Premium Collagen Peptides for $109.80, while the Gut and Hormone Bundle combines Flaura V and Luna V for $93.60, and the Inside Out Reset offers Flaura V bundled with your choice of Super Beauty Greens for $96.30.

The Gut Glow Stack is a bundle of Flaura V and your choice of two Glow Shakes for $178.50, while the Full Cycle Bundle offers your choice of two Glow Shakes, a Collagen Dream powder and Luna V for $207.20.

Collagen Co.’s Glow Shakes are a consistent best-seller, with an average 4.9 out of five star rating from more than 70,000 reviews.

The best-selling flavours include Chocolate Milkshake, which boasts over 6,200 five-star ratings, Iced Coffee and Violet Crumble Milkshake (over 5,000 and 4,500 five-star ratings respectively).

Shop the full range on the Collagen Co. website.

Molly Ticehurst’s former boyfriend has been sentenced to spend at least 20 years behind bars for her brutal and senseless murder, carried out in retaliation after she reported sexual assault allegations to police.

Daniel Billings remained calm and showed no emotion as the sentence was delivered in the NSW Supreme Court in Orange on Friday morning.

Ms Ticehurst, a 28-year-old childcare worker, was discovered dead in her pyjamas at her home in Forbes, in the state’s central west, during the early hours of April 22, 2024.

Billings, who had previously been in a relationship with her, forced his way into her bedroom and attacked her with a hunting knife, stabbing her 15 times in a frenzied assault that lasted less than a minute.

Justice Natalie Adams said the crime sat at the high end of seriousness, noting Billings killed Ms Ticehurst in precisely the way he had repeatedly threatened to do.

‘It must have been absolutely terrifying for Ms Ticehurst to die knowing her worst fears were realised,’ Justice Adams said.

The 31-year-old former mine worker had repeatedly threatened to smash into Ms Ticehurst’s bedroom and kill her in the months after she ended their on-and-off relationship in December 2023, according to police documents.

Ms Ticehurst reported this abuse to the police, who charged him with several counts of sexual assault and a series of domestic violence stalking and intimidation charges.

He was also charged with killing Ms Ticehurst’s dachshund puppy with a hammer after an earlier break-up.

Police took out a provisional apprehended violence order against Billings, barring him from entering Forbes.

Billings, who previously lived in Dalby, Queensland, spent one night in police custody, but was freed on bail by a local court registrar a fortnight before the murder as there was no judge on duty that weekend.

Upon his conditional release, Billings became enraged and obsessed with a belief he had been wrongfully accused of rape.

He viewed himself as a victim of injustice, also angered by his claim police threw his Queensland State of Origin boxing team singlet in the dirt.

In a series of chilling videos Billings recorded on his phone in the hours before the murder, he detailed his plans of harming Ms Ticehurst in revenge.

‘Molly Jean Ticehurst, well, you’ve done it, you’ve succeeded in whatever you wanted out of all of this, whether I get to you tonight or not,’ Billings snarled in one of the recordings made on the afternoon of April 21.

READ MORE: Ukraine’s Top Spy Chief Says Putin Has Just Two Years Left to Continue War

Justice Natalie Adams sentenced Billings to a maximum term of 28 years for what she described as a brutal attack.

She found Billings acted out of retribution, revenge and ‘extreme hatred’ for Ms Ticehurst, angry after she reported the rape allegations.

The murder was also a serious public justice offence, as Billings killed the only witness in his potential rape trial, the judge said.

Justice Adams looked to the Ticehurst family and offered her condolences.

‘It is clear that Molly’s senseless death has had a significant impact on those who loved her.’

Gaby Shepherd held up a large image of her slain friend when Billings entered the courtroom and sat in the dock.

He did not look in her direction, instead staring straight ahead and shaking his head any time the sexual assault allegations were mentioned by the judge.

Prosecutors did not seek a life sentence for Billings.

Billings pleaded guilty to murder after more than 500 days of legal negotiations, which led to the sexual assault charges being dropped in November 2025.

Charges of property damage, the animal cruelty offence and breaching the apprehended violence order were taken into consideration in the sentence.

Ms Ticehurst’s murder intensified a national campaign against domestic and gendered violence.

The movement sparked changes to NSW laws, including stripping registrars of the power to grant bail, ‘show cause’ thresholds for domestic violence-related bail applications and electronic monitoring for accused people.

Billings will be eligible for parole in April 2044.

1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732)

Lifeline 13 11 14

Men’s Referral Service 1300 766 491

On September 11, 2001, Virgin Atlantic Flight 75 left Manchester bound for Orlando, Florida, carrying an extraordinary group of travelers. Among those on board were 90 terminally ill children, each making the journey of a lifetime to Disney World with the support of the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

But when the aircraft finally landed, the scene outside the windows was not the cheerful welcome the children might have imagined. Instead of Mickey and Minnie waiting in the Florida sunshine, they saw stern-faced police officers surrounding the jet, determined to establish exactly who was aboard.

That day, 25 years ago, the Virgin plane became the first of 38 fully loaded passenger aircraft diverted to the isolated town of Gander in Newfoundland, Canada — the same remote airport I arrived at this week.

Today, Gander International Airport is a quiet place, handling barely five flights a day, most of them small aircraft. Passengers arriving there, whatever conditions they left behind, typically step straight onto the tarmac and make their way through rain or snow toward a terminal that still carries the stamp of the 1950s. Yet on September 11, the planes kept coming. What followed was an extraordinary five-day episode that changed many lives and became one of the few stories of compassion to emerge from the horror of the Al Qaeda attacks — later inspiring books, documentaries and the hit stage musical Come From Away, performed around the world.

The jets were diverted after President George W. Bush, responding to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the fear of further hijackings, made the unprecedented decision to shut down United States airspace.

‘Get those goddamn planes down,’ US Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta reportedly shouted to underlings from a bunker under the White House shortly after the fourth hijacked plane crashed into a Pennsylvania field.

Every civilian plane already flying over the US was told to land immediately while all international flights heading towards America were told to turn back or land in a different country. Any that entered US airspace were warned they would be shot down.

On the eastern tip of North America, the island of Newfoundland thrusts far into the Atlantic. So Gander, intentionally built close to the so-called ‘Great Circle’ route that most flights follow when flying between Europe and America, was the obvious destination for many planes when the shutdown was announced.

The story of how a town of 9,600 people rose magnificently and magnanimously to the challenge of suddenly having to care for nearly 7,000 frazzled, confused and often terrified airline passengers from 92 countries – is one of the most uplifting stories to emerge from 9/11.

Operation Yellow Ribbon, as it was known, has been hailed as a modern parable of compassion, community spirit and the kindness of strangers.

The musical it inspired, Come From Away (which takes its name from the description Newfoundlanders give to visitors from everywhere else) has been a huge hit – winning four Olivier awards in the West End and a Tony on Broadway. It has played across Europe, South Korea and the Philippines.

More than 50,000 people have travelled to Gander to see the production now running in a theatre in the airport building.

And as I discovered this week in a place where everyone brandishes their own 9/11 scrapbook, few in this close-knit community have forgotten their five days of glory while the world waited for the US to reopen its airspace and they shared their town.

Gander was famous once before when its location earned it the nickname of ‘Crossroads of the World’. The airport – around which the town gradually grew – was built in the late 1930s largely at the instigation of Britain as an essential transatlantic refuelling stop for propeller planes.

After the war, it was used heavily by airlines and – after its stylishly modernistic international lounge (including the celebrated Big Dipper bar) was opened by Queen Elizabeth in 1959 – it became the perfect star-spotting location. Humphrey Bogart, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles were among those who touched down on its beautiful orange and yellow leather banquettes. (Sinatra was famously told off for queue-jumping at the Big Dipper bar by a local – Newfoundlanders pride themselves on being unimpressed by celebrity).

But the advent of jumbo jets which could carry far more fuel meant air traffic from Gander dwindled, although its possession of two huge but underused runways – at one time the biggest in the world – ensured that it could be very useful in an emergency.

They’d never planned for an event like 9/11, Claude Elliott, Gander’s mayor at the time, told me. Many locals imagined the planes would only be there for a few hours but he suspected it would be considerably longer.

The local Red Cross organised accommodation while the Salvation Army distributed food. With the local radio and TV stations broadcasting a call to ‘lend a hand, do what you can’, schools and non-essential businesses were closed in Gander and the surrounding smaller townships so everyone could volunteer.

Newfies, as Newfoundlanders are known, are famous for their generosity and communal spirit – qualities that they attribute to the fact that their hardy fisherman ancestors, who mostly came from Ireland, Devon and Cornwall, had to rely heavily on each other as they struggled to survive in a harsh environment with ferocious winters. (Newfoundland – nicknamed The Rock – only reluctantly voted to leave the British Empire and become part of Canada in 1949).

In Gander, the planes were parked nose to tail on one of the runways but passengers couldn’t alight until police and the town’s sole immigration officer had assured themselves they weren’t letting a terrorist slip through.

Some passengers had to wait up to 12 hours cooped up on the runway before they were allowed off and – after running a gauntlet of metal detectors and pat-downs – allowed into the airport terminal.

They had virtually nothing with them as their main luggage was kept locked in the cargo hold. Some even thought they were being abducted.

A convoy of school buses, whose drivers had called off a strike as soon as they heard of the influx, were waiting outside to take them to various destinations – schools, churches, social organisations and even a Salvation Army summer camp outside town. (Gander’s 550 hotel rooms were reserved for aircraft crews.)

US officials initially requested the passengers from each plane remain together and didn’t want them staying in people’s houses because they were still concerned some might be terrorists. The airlines also wanted to keep them together in case they were given the all-clear to fly.

It made for some strange roommates as the denizens of First Class and Economy found themselves having to bed down next to each other on mattresses or camp beds on the floor of a school gym or recreation hall.

Prominent passengers included Werner Baldessarini, the chairman of fashion giant Hugo Boss, who’d been heading to New York Fashion Week; a US Army general in charge of intelligence; former supermodel Marisa Berenson, and the wife and children of Cheers star Woody Harrelson.

None of them asked for special treatment and when Mr Baldessarini was offered a Saudi Arabian prince’s private jet to come and pick him up, he politely declined insisting he had to see out the drama with his fellow passengers – although he did accept a consignment of clean underwear brought to him by a member of staff at his nearest store in St John’s, a three-hour drive away.

MORE STORY: Jets Enter Week 1 With Starting Kicker Decision Still Looming

The ‘Plane People’ as the locals called them, were treated less like refugees and more like long-lost relatives. Many would later say they were profoundly moved by the friendship shown to them – the perfect antidote to the 9/11 horrors that, after hours in agonising ignorance about what had happened, they could finally see in TV reports.

There were initially significant tensions between some US and Middle Eastern passengers, Gander’s current mayor, Percy Farwell, told me, but they dissipated ‘once everyone realised they were all in it together – it’s a great equaliser’. Some passengers, too desperate to wait, ‘mutinied’ and hired a bus to take them to the US border 650 miles away.

With requests broadcast on local TV, every Gander business donated supplies for free. Pharmacies filled prescriptions for those whose vital medication remained with their luggage on the planes, a local telephone company set up a bank of 100 phones the passengers could use day or night to make international calls to worried loved ones.

A local toyshop cleared out its warehouse and, lights blazing, a Gander fire engine roared around town handing it all out to the visiting children.

The generosity continued on a personal level. Gander people gave them their bedding, their clothing, their food and their time. Gander is not the most prepossessing place – more a sprawling suburb of housing estates, business parks and retail strips than a conventional town. At the time it reportedly had just four sets of traffic lights.

The Newfies took people off on fishing expeditions and hikes, entertained them at night with karaoke, live music and drinks in the pub, and treated them to local delicacies such as ‘bottled moose’.

Many invited Plane People to come and take a shower or even – if they looked particularly worn out – stay in their house.

Bonnie Harris, who runs the local animal shelter, scrabbled around in plane cargo holds to rescue 19 ‘forgotten’ pets which were then looked after in an aircraft hanger.

When local police officer Oz Fudge, famous for hugging any Plane Person he thought needed it, heard that several of the terminally-ill British children who’d been on that Virgin flight had birthdays, he helped organise a Disney-themed party for all 350 passengers on their plane.

A shop baked a 14ft-long cake, there were clowns and a sea of balloons while Constable Fudge’s daughter and her friends dressed up as Disney princesses.

The children eventually had to fly back to the UK and never made it to Disney World but one of the birthday girls’ fathers revealed to Constable Fudge she’d admitted she enjoyed herself so much in Gander it didn’t matter. ‘That tore the heart right out of me,’ he said.

Even romance blossomed among the Plane People. Nick Marson, an oil industry engineer from the UK and Diane Gray, a buyer for a Texas department store, flirted for days as they slept feet apart in a school gym and then kissed on the bus back to their plane. They married a year later and honeymooned in the place where they first met.

The generosity of the Newfies could be overwhelming. When a local school requested loo rolls, they rapidly received enough rolls to last a year. So much fresh food was donated that the town’s ice rink was turned into a giant fridge.

Down at the local branch of the Royal Canadian Legion, where 67 Aer Lingus passengers shared the hall floor, Legion stalwart Beulah Cooper (who inspired one of the main characters in the musical) epitomises the Gander spirit.

‘I don’t shake hands, I’m a hugger,’ she informed me. Her first reaction on learning that so many planes were landing in Gander, she said, was to think: ‘Thank God they’re coming here because I know they will be looked after’.

And they certainly were. ‘The day they left here we all lined up at the bar and sang For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow and So Long it’s Been Good to Know You”, and there weren’t many dry eyes that went out that door.’

Beulah, now 85, who put up three women in her own home, kept passengers’ spirits up with trays of sandwiches and a limitless supply of saucy jokes.

She particularly bonded with an Irish-American passenger named Hannah O’Rourke who was frantically worried about her son Kevin, a New York firefighter, who had gone missing in the World Trade Centre. Beulah’s own son was a volunteer fireman and she walked Hannah to church to pray.

The O’Rourkes later discovered their son had indeed died but – like so many of the relationships forged in Gander which have continued in the subsequent decades– the two women remained friends for years until Hannah died of cancer in 2025.

Why has what happened at Gander resonated so profoundly with people? Former mayor Claude Elliott believes his town ‘restored faith in people’ after the nightmare of September 11.

‘We like to say that on the 11th you saw the worst of Man, and then on the 12th you saw the best,’ he said. ‘Right now, with our world in such a mess, people are looking for a good news story and this is the one they are grabbing onto.’

As if to prove his point, minutes later he’s embraced in the airport terminal by Charlotte Bayford, from Colchester, Essex, who has seen the Gander musical 60 times and has flown to the town with friends to see it again. She said she found it inspiring to find so much ‘kindness and compassion’ in a true story.

The visitors started arriving on a Tuesday and had gone by Sunday – many looking far more emotional than when they’d arrived. ‘I’m not sure we could have gone on many more days – people were exhausted,’ said Mr Elliott.

‘Gander was lonely when they all left, said Beulah Cooper. ‘But it did your heart good to know you were part of it.’

The passengers not only left $60,000 to help pay for their stay but some also contributed $85,000 worth of new computers to a local school while others set up a $2million scholarship fund to help young Newfoundlanders attend university.

Many continue to return to see old friends even as – thanks largely to the musical – Gander has become a tourist attraction.

The idea that an event as horrific as 9/11 could spawn a musical seems outrageous, but it speaks volumes for a little town’s ability to conjure a small heartwarming triumph out of a heartbreaking disaster.