Will red light skin therapy stop you from aging?

One thing I’ve learned from moving in with my girlfriend is that there are products to beautify parts of your body men have never thought about and no one can see without being inches away from you. I still laugh about when she told me about her cuticle rejuvenator. Women’s skincare is a massive industry full of room for exaggerated claims, in my opinion. Red-light LED therapy seemed like a candidate to me, especially when I saw the $400 price tag on some of these masks. That’s expensive! I mean, this looks like something you would find in Zedd’s pawn shop basement.

As a favor to the ladies out there, I decided to take a look at the data supporting it. In reviewing I wanted to check whether:

1.      Theres good evidence for red light therapies in reducing wrinkles, or acne, or dark spots, or whatever, basically.

2.      Whether there’s evidence to justify a $400 mask over a $15 mask

Evidence for reducing, whatever:

First off, I’ve gotta note that I’m not confident in a lot of the measurements that people are taking to assess the efficacy of these treatments. For one, the data collected is often subjective and asks: How do you feel about your skin?

That tells you something. Precisely, what it tells you is how people feel about their skin. What it doesn’t tell you is whether it’s actually improved. Ideally, we have physical measurements using something objective, like a ruler. So studies without measurements I discount here, and I pay very little mind to the subjective when it’s included. Especially since these trials are not placebo randomized.

What I’d like to see is a single randomized trial where the people getting treatment or placebo are blinded (eyes covered), with one group getting a pseudo-mask, maybe a mask which heats up a little bit to mimic the effects of a red-light mask, and the other getting a red light mask. Then measurements of acne, collagen density, wrinkle volume, etc. taken before and after. The raw data should be included in the publication. In my searching I haven’t seen one that has the raw data shown. That would be useful. For the most part, the data is from industry-funded studies, so there’s an obvious interest in collecting data which makes the product look good. Do you think a red light mask company would publish a study that says their product doesn’t work?

Also, I don’t know the variability of physical measurements. How much does the volume of crow’s feet vary day to day, or over the course of a month? Does hydration affect this? Do these measures ever go down naturally? Between seasons?

With those limitations in mind, we can get into it.

Acne:

This one is easiest because the legwork was done by Cochrane. I have mentioned them before, but they are the gold standard for medical evidence, and they do the hard work of reviewing studies, filtering for quality, and boiling down the evidence.

“We are unable to draw firm conclusions from the results of our review, as it was not clear whether the light therapies (including PDT) assessed in these studies were more effective than the other comparators tested such as placebo, no treatment, or treatments rubbed on the skin, nor how long the possible benefits lasted.”

I read the whole review, and the takeaway is that the evidence is too garbage to make any conclusions on effects of light therapy on acne. They looked through 42 randomized studies with 4,211 patients. The review was published in 2016, prior reviews (not by Cochrane) had stated confidently that light therapy helps but those used a lot of non-randomized data which is often worse than useless as it’s designed with a conclusion in mind.

Wound healing:

I couldn’t find a single randomized paper on this, surprisingly. NASA apparently believes in the healing powers of red light, but I could not find any published studies on this. It would be nice if our government bodies doing research with taxpayer dollars would publish papers.

I found one study doing experiments in mice and measuring some would healing and some immunology outcomes. But immunology is among the sciences most prone to nonsense. Practically it becomes an exercise in interpreting the meaning of omens signaled by various cytokines. Once you read enough of these papers you notice a pattern of interpreting the same signals to mean different things based on the desire of the researchers, ignoring the cytokines that the researchers don’t like.

Though from this study I do think we can take away that high intensities of light does do something, at least after an hour a day for 7 days, in mice.

Wrinkles

Now for the money maker. Wrinkles.

I wish there was a Cochrane review for this, but there isn’t. So my review of the data is not going to be super comprehensive. My read of the data is that it’s largely faced with identical issues to the Cochrane highlighted issues. Low quality studies, small sample sizes, a glut of non-randomized data. For the most part, all you get when trying to research it is to articles like this:

With “sciencey” sounding statements: “With red light devices, the red LED enters the fibroblast cell and stimulates collagen production—the key to healthy, younger-looking skin—and diminishes fine lines and wrinkles.” Gross adds that red LED also increases circulation and decreases redness, reducing inflammation and hyperpigmentation with consistent use.”

It should go without saying, that you should not trust articles like this. They are an advertisement, not a review of evidence. They are paid to write these articles.

I found one randomized trial to look for an effect on wrinkles with at least an attempt to use a systematic measure. This trial has lots of problems, about half of the people in the trial didn’t finish the trial, which is generally a bad sign. They measured skin elasticity but only use data from ½ the participants due to “issues with the files.” They do report a reduction in wrinkle volume for both amber and red light treatment, but I’d say the trial is low reliability.

Another study testing the $400 omnilux mask found no effect on skin hydration, or elasticity, and blinded researchers only guessed which photographs were of treatment vs. control correctly 75% of the time. This is better than random, which would be 50%, but still shows the effect is not clear enough for an expert to gauge whether someone uses a red light mask at all. The accuracy they hit is suspiciously close to the value they would need to achieve statistical significance (P=0.046). When you see a chart with comic sans, random capitalization, and pointless 3D that’s also a bad sign. The observant reader might also notice that 50% say skin feels firmer, and 60% say skin feels softer, which means that some people must say that their skin feels softer and also firmer, bad sign.

This one from dior x lucibel is pretty characteristic of the “scientific proof” bandied about. There’s no controls, and one of the authors is a CEO of the company making the mask. This is an advertisement, not an experiment. To make this worth anything you’d have to have the analysis done by blinded researchers, and include a control group which didn’t get treatment. Otherwise you can game the data to produce any result you want. Unfortunately, this will be cited by the beauty media as “peer reviewed proof” that the mask is the cure for your skin aging woes.

All together, I would rate this as evidence that it’s maybe a bit helpful. I would give it a 10-30% chance of being helpful, but for something with little downside that’s not too bad. It does seem that light masks have some bioactivity.

Comparison of devices

This is where I feel more certain. There is absolutely no evidence that the more expensive masks are justified. Any claim which says there is, is not justified by any supporting evidence.

First off, the claims that a specific wavelength is required are not supported by trial data, which would require randomization of groups to different wavelengths. Any trial I’ve seen comparing any light to no light there isn’t a difference across wavelengths. This one just tested bright, normal (energizing) light vs. red light and the outcomes on wrinkles, feeling, etc look basically the same, and there isn’t a real measure. No one appears to have studied whether light intensity makes a difference.  

I just don’t get it frankly. LED bulbs are super cheap, batteries are pretty cheap. Putting them in a molded face shape isn’t a complicated manufacturing process. Expensive masks feel like a pretty pure scam to me. My recommendation would be to buy a cheap one if you want to try it out and take detailed before/after pictures.  

A pretty unsatisfying investigation, though, nothing to debunk because there’s no data, sorry ladies.