There are all kinds of expensive beauty treatments on the market — various creams, zappy lasers, and fine mists of heavily-refined chemicals. For [Ruth Amos], a $78,000 LED bed had caught her eye, and she wondered if she could recreate the same functionality on the cheap.
The concept behind [Ruth]’s build is simple enough. Rather than buy a crazy-expensive off-the-shelf beauty product, she decided to just buy equivalent functional components: a bunch of cheap red LEDs. Then, all she had to do was build these into a facemask and loungewear set to get the same supposed skin improving benefits at much lower cost.
[Ruth] started her build with a welding mask, inside which she fitted red LED strips of the correct wavelength for beneficial skin effects. She then did the same with an over-sized tracksuit, lacing it with an array of LED strips to cover as much of the body as possible. While it’s unlikely she was able to achieve the same sort of total body coverage as a full-body red light bed, nor was it particularly comfortable—her design cost a lot less—on the order of $100 or so.
Of course, you might question the light therapy itself. We’re not qualified to say whether or not red LEDs will give you better skin, but it’s not the first time we’ve seen a DIY attempt at light therapy.
Well, looks like the times of ripping off esoteric people are gone. Now its the time to build some weird stuff and call it “beauty therapy”.
Mark my words.
Not long and someone will build a suit filled with piezo buzzers and call it “acoustic frequency hormonizer” and state it betters your skin by harmonizes your resonances or some BS.
You mean like the Schumann resonance gadgets on aliexpress?
Power Balance all over again, except they didn’t even need piezo buzzers!
Shh, stop giving them ideas. ;)
This is however something supported by scientific research.
Don’t expose your ignorance.
My uncle thinks he can heal people by parping his didgeridoo at them. If he could buy a set of tubes that seem to automatically parp at him in a vaguely Australian way I’m sure he’d buy it.
I know a lot of people who think that SSRIs help them even though the mechanism has been disproven several times over the past thirty years
argone accumulator anyone? I got asked to make one for someone once…
At least this is mostly harmless and the originals are only separating rich idiots from their money.
But, it’s reminiscent of the woo woo gadgets which are sold with implied claims of being alzheimers, cancer, whichever nasty life limiting disease they care to name treatments and allegedly work by shining lights of different colours in various patterns/frequencies onto bits of the body.
I wish the slime who prey on the desperate were afflicted with the disease they’re claiming to cure with their BS.
Here in Czech republic i saw public health insurance to cover magnet therapy. So it’s an incentive for a clinics to sing you up for magnet therapy instead of actual cure, because cost for them is zero and insurance copany will pay them anyway.
sounds like Electronic Snake oil to me.
Easy to say ‘mostly harmless’ or that a different oddity is pure snake oil, but really you have to research even pretty stupid seeming things before you can make that claim. Random seeming bit of tree bark is toxic to the point you likely die with small exposure, while similarly random seeming bit of bark might be comparable to Aspirin, or rather good for you in some way at a very low concentration etc.
The core of the concept here is actually pretty simple to prove sound – as does your skin react to exposure to different wavelengths in different ways? The answer to which is really darn obvious and easy to see now at least for the lighter coloured skintones that tan/burn in a very visible way. Which thanks to research you can prove is a reaction to the UV end of the spectrum. So the concept that exposure to a controlled amount of a very specific X-ray, IR, Radio frequency, or microwaves might actually prove beneficial (at least to your appearance) trigger some other mechanism wouldn’t be a surprise.
Which is not to say I actually believe this is genuine, as I’ve not read the papers, seen the peer reviews or done any research on it myself (and I personally really don’t care enough on this topic to do so). But it isn’t impossible, at least till proven otherwise keep an open mind.
Okay but what does the red light actually do? I watched the entire video, and I still don’t know this.
Read scientific papers I linked above.
Thanks for your effort
I am very interested in the effect of light on human body (and mind). Tried to diy a lucid dreaming mask but it never went anywhere
I recently met some people who work in optogenetics, which is the use of light to selectively activate neurons or other tissue types. Much more invasive than a light mask, but very cool nonetheless.
You mean the scientific papers ChatGPT linked above.
They are still scientific papers with a research. Now show yours.
Show my what? I’m not arguing the validity of the studies. I’m talking about how ChatGPT contributes to a dumbing-down of interaction on the internet.
Jesus, give it up. If the papers came up in a Google search, would you be so stubbornly dug in over how they were found?
The papers are not the issue here. I honestly don’t care whether they support this therapy or not. What I care about is whether ChatGPT can be trusted to accurately summarise them, and whether they support the claims ChatGPT is making. My own experience and countless examples have shown that ChatGPT lies and hallucinates. It makes stuff up that isn’t in the citation it gives. It is worse than useless – it is actively harmful.
I can’t speak to skin treatments, but for treatment of TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) & Concussions (slightly less traumatic brain injury) I was surprised with how effective this type of therapy can be.
My GF had a concussion last summer, and after ~5-6 months of slow recovery, even with extensive cognitive rest, we started looking for other options. Red Light Therapy was mentioned a few times, and I was pretty skeptical, but I figured I could do a little research and it turns out that it’s actually quite effective at neurological rehab! I was pretty surprised, honestly – it’s just shining lights at someone’s head, right?
Actually – using specific wavelengths in the low-infrared/red spectrum, the energy penetrates a few cm into the skull and causes increased bloodflow to those areas – apparently? I found a few decent peer reviewed studies that didn’t really explain the entire mechanism, but showed significant improvement, and for my GF it’s been night/day. She’s able to hold conversations again, sleep, has her short term memory back – basically she can function after treatments. She’s done ~2 months of biweekly treatments, and they’re starting to ramp her down – but this was a huge step forward in recovery for her.
Significant Improvements in Cognitive Performance Post-Transcranial, Red/Near-Infrared Light-Emitting Diode Treatments in Chronic, Mild Traumatic Brain Injury: Open-Protocol Study – Journal of Neurotrauma 2014.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4043367/
Transcranial Low-Level Laser (Light) Therapy for Brain Injury – Photomed Laser Surgery, 2016
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5180077/
The radiation intensity mentioned in that paper (22 mW/cm^2) is about the same as if you took a walk in sunshine (100 mW/cm^2 over the whole spectrum, roughly 20-25 mW/cm^2 in the “red”, depending on what you call “red”).
Note the postulated mechanism is absorption by cytochrome-c oxidase, part of the metabolic process that produces ATP, the internal “fuel” in cells. It has an absorption peak at 600 nm, what most people would call the orange end of red.
Cerebral blood flow is regulated by nitric oxide (NO), in turn modulated by local carbon dioxide concentration. You can double the blood flow in your brain just by holding your breath for a minute. It also changes with postural changes, and even by just thinking hard. It’s a pretty crappy measure of a “treatment”.
Not saying it’s snake oil, but just because it’s published and peer-reviewed doesn’t necessarily make it ‘true’, even if positive effects are associated with it.
The first paper is self-reported outcomes, and the last line of the abstract is that placebo controlled studies are indicated. While I agree with those statements on a technical level, self-reported outcomes are very, very suspect and, as stated, should really only be used as a pilot or justification for a “proper” (aka pain to conduct, expensive) study. Placebo works really well for some people. I’m not here to say their improvements are any less real, just that the mechanism is (likely) vastly different than what is claimed.
The second paper is a pretty weird combination review article and “summary of experiments we did” in mice. Off the top of my head many other mechanisms are possible- localized heating, who knows.
It makes you feel like you’re in a Gaspar Noe flick, which has significant biological effects
Changing all my computer applications to a red theme now… look at that screen glow, although my room now looks like the inside of an old submarine in battle mode. But we can’t have wrinkles…
Combat the wrinkles! Red photon torpedoes on tubes 5 and 6! Fire!
Nice YouTube thumbnail, I can’t wait to watch this video. /s
HaD is now into chakras.
There is some science behind it. Even if it doesn’t work, isn’t hacking something to allow you to try it out rather than buying a commercial product what HaD is all about?
Ever considered just logging off, I mean permanently? The world would obviously benefit.
Apparently so is NASA
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20030001599
One reason it caught NASA’s attention is the fact that an injury on a long duration mission is going to be hard to supply with conventional pharmaceuticals.
Ah yes, the vibe-based method of spotting disinformation. Very nice
I vividly remember “studies” that showed that red LED lights caused muscle weakness. Someone once even demonstrated to a bunch of AT&T engineers (I sh*t you not) that a Texas Instrument digital watch (the old red led kind) made the wearer’s arms weaker (it was the old “slow push / fast push” trick that hucksters had been using forever.
Could we please normalize the fact that there just because there are “studies” doesn’t mean that “there’s science behind it.”
Guess what else has “studies”? Homeopathy, reiki, Ayurveda, “biofields”.
10,000+ papers were retracted in 2023. With AI chum and for-profit paper mills that should probably be millions.
I agree be careful and verify before you believe. However also keep an open mind as so many ‘natural’ and ‘quack’ and other ‘crazy’ remedies over the years have proven to have some basis in fact once the studies are done (though not always the way it was thought etc).
What’s the ratio of “quackery proven turned legit” to “quackery still quackery”?
Because from my perspective for every “yes, a plant based diet may be good for some health issues” there seems to be about a 100 “apple cider vinegar cures everything”.
A $78,000 LED bed when 30 minutes of sunlight will give you exactly the same dosage seems a bit of a “red flag” for me.
A dose of full spectrum vs targeted wavelengths can’t really be considered equal without study.. For all I know the sunlight might be able to do the job but at the same time we already know what UV that is in sunlight does to the skin, and that isn’t particularly good for you (in higher doses anyway), so the concept of a targeted wavelength treatment that triggers only the right biological process selectively likely has merits.
Also the price of the bed is not really relevant – the science behind it will either be true, false or some nuanced middle ground even if it was several powers of 10 more expensive or cheaper. Getting some rich folks to buy something at a high price really isn’t a shocker, its the whole reason Lamborghini (etc) cars exist, as those really are not about being cost effective…
Also worth considering that the other way as well as how many ‘legit’ ideas get proved to be quackery or at least erroneous in the end – for a prolonged period Earth was the centre of the universe and all else rotates around it, electronics have that hopefully well known oddity in our circles of Conventional Current, it was thought just about the only thing that mattered to survival odds in an amputation was the speed as which it was performed etc etc.
As soon as you start to assume you know without having actually done several lifetimes of research I’d suggest history implies you will be wrong or at best only in the ballpark of correct pretty darn often… Though it might take a century or two for somebody else to prove it, so I guess you could ‘get away’ with it…
A red LED watch turned to face your skin is sort of worthless, especially the type where you had to press a button to read the time.
Oh so studies aren’t always reliable huh? Jamie let’s pull up those mask studies from 2020 that overturned decades of previous research which used no human subjects, no control, and only water droplets with no live virus
I’m trying really hard to be respectful, but the core concept that red wavelength light somehow magically fixes skin (which is never defined, as noted by another commenter above) is super suspect. Not impossible, but everything points to absolutely bunk science. From being extraordinarily expensive to celebrity endorsements to simply not passing the “sniff test.”
.
Being charitable, though, it is certainly true that red light in particular passes through tissue pretty well as any kid that stuck a hand over a flashlight (ok, “torch” to our UK colleagues) has demonstrated. And medical pulse oximeters function in that very same way. Is it doing anything, though? And even if it is doing something, what are the chances that is is beneficial, and so profoundly effective that it is easily detectible in a “hey look how great my skin looks now” … especially on the background of celebrity endorsement, those same people that have a professional team of publicists, stylists, photographers and literally who’s job it is to sell you stuff. Sell you anything. I mean. Slim to none.
.
All that said, super rad (red?) project by the hacker to spend not a lot of money to at least give it a whirl. If, as I suspect, it is all totally bogus, it is probably also at least totally harmless. Fun stuff.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20030001599
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260964425_The_NASA_light-emitting_diode_medical_program-progress_in_space_flight_and_terrestrial_applications
https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2005/hm_1.html
So two of those papers are 20 years old and the third is a press release. If NASA had discovered the key to health improvements by using a handful of LED’s I have a feeling it wouldn’t be in the form of a celebrity endorsed magic bed 20 years later.
Hey look! There are “more than 150 published, controlled clinical trials using homeopathy.” https://www.takingcharge.csh.umn.edu/there-good-scientific-evidence-homeopathy
Let’s go cure and prevent horrible diseases with tiny vials of water …
You guys are getting silly and grasping at straws.
Do you think that research has never been ignored for 20 years and then caught on as a fad for capricious reasons?
All you guys have is smug reddit snark, then you are shown studies, then you have smug irrelevant reddit comparisons to chakras or homeopathy “but whatabout” nonsense. It’s a complete non-sequitur. I’m not completely sold on the red light thing either, but the evidence that you are better than those you look down on is pretty thin
The concept that certain wavelengths of light have effects on the body is not exactly novel.. We all know what a underdose or overdose of ultraviolet can do. But yes, the celebrity endorsements are silly and the idea that you need to spend tens of thousands or even a hundred dollars is absurd. A chicken lamp is a few bucks. Will it do anything? Idk but the chickens do seem to like it