Vivid vs the alternatives

Most South African supplement shelves are filled with two kinds of products: imported brands that were bulk-bought, repackaged, and marked up; and large-cap house brands that hide their doses inside proprietary blends. Vivid is neither. Here is the side-by-side.

Vivid vs imported supplements

What you get	Imported supplement	Vivid Health
Dose on the label	Sometimes. Often hidden in a "proprietary blend"	Always. Every milligram, named, on the front
Made where	USA / EU / India / China — then bulk imported	Centurion, South Africa
SA support if you have questions	Email a foreign HQ, response in 2–5 days	WhatsApp our naturopaths. Same-day reply
Delivery to your door	Often via large e-commerce — 3-5 working days	Free over R400. 1–3 working days nationwide
Returns / refunds	Often via the importer. Long process.	30 days, no questions asked. Direct refund.
SA Rand pricing	FX exposure. Prices jump with the rand	ZAR-stable. We absorb FX
Formulation expertise on call	Customer service rep, not a practitioner	15-min free call with a SA-qualified naturopath

Vivid vs the supermarket multivitamin

Most chemist and supermarket multivitamins use a wide-ingredient, low-dose model — many vitamins and minerals at small amounts in one capsule. The trade-off:

• You get convenience (one bottle)
• You lose dose-specificity (most actives are too low to do anything therapeutic)
• You lose form-specificity (magnesium oxide instead of magnesium glycinate, etc.)
• You cannot adjust upward when you need more of a specific nutrient

Vivid’s approach is: identify the one or two specific outcomes you are working on, take a single-focus formulation at the trial dose for 6–8 weeks, then reassess. You will spend more on each bottle, but you will use what you buy.

Vivid vs proprietary-blend supplements

A "proprietary blend" is when a label tells you the combined total weight of multiple actives — e.g. "Adrenal Support Blend 800mg" — without telling you the milligrams of each. This is legal but tells you nothing useful. The brand could be using 750mg of cheap rice bran and 50mg of the active that does the work.

Vivid never uses proprietary blends. If a Vivid label says it has Withania Somnifera, it tells you 300mg of Withania Somnifera root extract standardised to 5% withanolides. Every time.