Short Wave - Should You Try Red-Light Therapy?

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

The anti-aging product market was worth roughly 53 BILLION dollars in 2024. One of the latest big trends: red light therapy. Social media is rampant with claims about all sorts of purported health benefits to using directed red light regularly … but does the research really live up to all the hype?For answers, we turn to cosmetic chemist and science communicator Michelle Wong. Together, she and host Regina G. Barber sift through the thin (albeit growing) research on red light therapy to find out which claims are clearly backed by the literature – and which still need a bit more experimental data. Interested in more science behind skincare products? Email us your question at [e-mail] to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

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The anti-aging product market was roughly worth $53 billion in 2024. There's moisturizers, chemical creams, jade rollers, and of course, something that's gotten popular in the last few years. Red light therapy masks. And I have to admit, I'm susceptible to. Aging is something I think about a lot. Like, every single day for the last. three decades as I applied my moisturizer and sunscreen.

Which is why I was intrigued by the claims that red light, literally light at the wavelength of visible red light and some near infrared red light, could actually reduce signs of aging. And as I scoured the scientific literature for this episode, I also became obsessed with any real-time anecdata and validation in the meantime. Like, was I totally on an island? with this reporting obsession, or were my colleagues too? So I pulled a ton of people around the office from producers in their 20s, like Moncei, Corona. I use it once a week.

I think surprisingly I do think it works. Like, I do notice that my skin feels, like, looks just a little tighter after I use it. Do colleagues closer to my age, like Nina Phil? I had heard great things about red light therapy for skin. I have a skin disease and very sensitive skin on my face. So I thought, this isn't a bad thing to have an addition. It can't hurt, right? I love it.

I'm obsessed with it. Obviously, next step in my quest, try it myself. And okay, yeah, after using a red light therapy mask as directed, 10 minutes, three to five times a week for over a month, I thought I saw a difference for the better. But I'm a scientist. I can't fall into these anecdotal data traps. I needed to get to the bottom of the science. So I reached out to someone who skillfully breaks down the science of beauty. What does it do? Which masks actually work? Why are they so expensive? And can you make your own cheaper version? That's Michelle Wong. She's a PhD chemist who hosts the YouTube channel Lab muffin Beauty Science. So I asked her point blank, is there science behind all these red light claims? It's meant to be good for skin, it's meant to be good for a whole list of things that there's a lot of woo around it, I feel, which is why it feels so pseudoscience-y to begin with. But it turns out there is stuff behind it.

Today on the show, the benefits of red light. What is the science behind this craze? And what other methods might be just as good for your skin? I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. So let's get into the science. How could red light or near-infrared light help your skin? Can you break that down for us?

Yeah, so red and infrared light, they are the longer wavelengths. So red is the longest wavelength of visible light. They aren't absorbed by as much stuff near the surface of the skin. So they can penetrate deeper. Okay. And now the mechanisms of how exactly, it works, it's not fully established, but it seems like the main way that red light works is inside our cells, we have things called mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell that produce

energy through respiration, and that energy powers a lot of the biological processes inside ourselves. And there's part of the respiration process, which is done by an enzyme, like a little chemical factory. It's the one that chops up oxygen in half. And so, There's nitric oxide that's sitting in the space where oxygen should be. And the red light just kicks out the nitric oxide. So now the oxygen can come in. For respiration, you get more chemical energy, which means you get more cell processes. Oh, okay.

So that's why we have this very general sort of benefits of light. We get all this stuff where it just seems to increase, like, cell growth. It increases hair growth. It increases healing of wounds. things like that. And is that pretty established that it is, the red light is doing that to ourselves? Yeah, so the mitochondria mechanism, that's the one that seems to be happening the most, but there is actually a little bit of evidence that in cells that don't have mitochondria, that seems to also have improvement. Yeah. So as a physicist, I kind of expect like light,

which is energy, to be bad for my skin. So how is sending, you know, light into my skin? How can it good for me. Yeah, so I think light does stuff to our skin in more ways than we'd expect. We have a precursor to vitamin D in our skin and at one point in the process of vitamin D production, UVB will come in and chop a bond and yeah, that takes it closer to vitamin D. So that's why people are lower in vitamin D in winter because they go into the sun. There's less sun around to begin with, there's less UVB. Right. Which means that you don't have that, um, natural production of vitamin D in your skin and everyone's like you have to take supplements or whatever. Light is good at chopping up bonds. So whether it's the bond inside the vitamin D

or it's the bond that's sticking the nitric oxide to the mitochondria. Interesting. Okay, so light can be good sometimes. Getting back to this specific light, what are the differences between red light that you might find in the dermatologist's office and what you can do at home? Yeah, so usually when you go into an in-clinic treatment, it's going to be a little. lot stronger. It's going to be very bright because they can afford these much bigger panels. There's a lot more LEDs. There are panels you can get at home though, which are still pretty bright. And then there are masks. Masks usually have a lot less LEDs. And I guess there's a bit of a question mark around how effective home treatments are because there's not that much research. And

there's not that much incentive for research or publicly available research because approval of these devices isn't necessary. Right. This is generally the case for skincare. If there's something where they need to convince doctors, then they'll do peer-reviewed studies. But if they don't, then you get very spotty, publicly available evidence. A lot of it is done within the industry and it's locked up and they just don't share it, which is very annoying as someone who's trying to talk about the size behind beauty products. So with that in mind, there's masks, there's these panels. There's also like these handheld red light therapy devices. Do you have any sense of how effective these devices are? That's a really difficult question because there's just like a lot of lack of regulation and

standardization when it comes to these things. I mean, a lot of people buy panels and masks off Alibaba, for example. And one of the big problems is that it doesn't seem like a lot of them have specs that are reliable. Wow. But yeah, I think generally looking at that, looking at reviews, and then just using the specific product, that is probably the safest bet in terms of which ones to go with. There are things like, I've been in a lot of forums looking this stuff up just to try to get some sort of grasp of what the real use situation is like. And you see a lot of people who have just gone too bright for too long, and they're

reporting side effects. There's things like broken blood vessels. Oh, wow. getting much darker. Yeah, when they say like three to five times a week, it doesn't mean daily. It doesn't mean you need to do like that and more light or something like that. Yeah, I think a lot of people do think more is better, especially people who are new to skincare. So it seems like biologically, it's a bit like when you're eating food. If you try to eat all your food for three weeks on the first day and then go hiking for

three weeks and eat nothing, that doesn't really work. Your body doesn't process the the same way. Our bodies don't work that way. Yeah. Got it. And you're saying that there are some products that aren't necessarily what they say they are. So like how do we, how do we as a consumer, like, no. It's always a good idea to consult with a dermatologist before you add anything to your routine that might be a bit iffy like a red light mask. Yeah. But yeah, I think the safest thing to do is to look for a company that has a lot of reviews. Ideally, It's a company that's done some research. So the one that has done the most research is Omnilat's, the most published studies on this.

They've also done a lot of the panel research, so they are probably the safest option. But I don't think by any means they're the only option. I think also just a company that has a good return policy, I think is also really important because it is such uncharted waters. And looking up reviews for your specific skin tone and for what you actually want to use the product for. because I think there's just a lot of people buying products that are hyped up without thinking whether or not it matches what they want out of it. And I think in general, the amount of evidence for red light is much less than for other

skincare things that are really well established. Can you kind of go into depth with these other things that may be cheaper and, like you said, more scientifically studied? Yeah, and also a bit easier to use, I think, and less commitment and less pain. Okay. So sunscreen is the best skincare product because a lot of our skin aging is from the sun. I think for white people, it's been estimated that 80% of visible skin aging is from sun exposure. And the amount of sun you get, it's not just when you're going to the beach, it's every day.

So there are studies done. There's one especially famous one from Australia, where they found that. that people who are wearing sunscreen every day, their skin during the four to five year time they were wearing the sunscreen, there were no increased visible signs of aging, whereas the people who were wearing it just to the beach did have this. And this was done in Australia in our skin cancer capital of Australia, which is the skin cancer capital of the world. Wow. And this is also important because there are some anti-aging products that can actually make your skin more sensitive to the sun. And I've had friends who did this, where they started

using the anti-aging product without sunscreen. And their skin got worse. So sunscreen, number one. Okay, check. Nice. The second biggest thing is probably Tretanoan. This is a type of vitamin A. It's a prescription product.

It seems to increase cell turnover. So your cells are produced faster. And it can increase collagen and elastin. These are the proteins that are deeper in the skin that help with texture. So Tretanoan is the prescription. version that has the most evidence behind it. But there's the cosmetic versions like rationale, which are one step weaker, but they do seem to work. They were actually investigated first before they started looking into tritone. But they weren't stable enough

back then. Now they are stabilized, so they also work. Michelle, thank you so much for talking to us today. I had a great time that you illuminated me, my thoughts. You really, really helped me think through this. So thank you so much. Thank you for having me. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Burley McCoy and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. Robert Rodriguez was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber.

Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.