Description

LED skincare devices are a new and exciting development in skincare treatment technology. While in-office devices have been demonstrated to be effective, there are new at-home LED devices popping up frequently, ranging from stand-alone devices to smart-phones applications. Dr. Schultz explains whether or not the at-home LED devices are effective and why.

Transcript

Dr. Neal Schultz: Hello I'm Dr. Neal Schultz and welcome to DermTV. We're hearing more and more about personal at-home devices that use different colored lights that supposedly treat different medical conditions like acne and facial rejuvenation. The prices of these at-home devices vary from as little as $2 for a Smartphone application to as much as $250 for certain proprietary devices. Now it is true that there are real medical professional devices that use different colored lights to successfully treat certain medical conditions like acne and facial rejuvenation. The red and yellow lights, which are delivered with either LEDs, which are light-emitting diodes or lasers are very helpful for facial rejuvenation because they help to stimulate collagen production and they smooth the texture of your skin. Blue laser lights and some blue LED lights can be used to kill bacteria in the skin and those are the bacteria that cause pus pimples and inflammatory acne and therefore they are successful in treating acne. But here's the problem. The power and the energy and the actual quality of the lights in the at-home devices just isn't the same as it is in the professional devices, and I'm going to give you a demonstration. This is an iPhone and it has an app called Acne App. You can see there is blue and red flashing light and supposedly that is supposed to help both facial rejuvenation build collagen, and cure acne. Despite the fact that there is a disclaimer at the end of the program that says this is not intended to treat any medical disease. This is a professional LED machine with light-emitting diodes, they are approximately 800 LEDs, which are delivering yellow light and I will show you the difference at least in the power and the quality of the light. This treatment usually lasts for about 23 or 24 seconds and clearly we're talking about two very different worlds. If I give the at-home devices the benefit of the doubt and say, yes they can possibly have some small level of efficacy, I'll leave you with two thoughts. Number one, of course buyer, beware. Number two, you don't always get what you pay for, but you can be sure of one thing, you never get more than you pay for. Please join me again at dermtv.com. If you have a question please send me by visiting dermtv.com/question. I'm Dr. Neal Schultz and thank you for watching today.