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. ;)
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.
ChatGPT: “There are several scientific studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of red light therapy for skin care. For instance, a study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology found that low-level red and infrared light therapy can significantly increase the production of collagen, elastin, and hyaluronic acid in skin cells. This suggests potential benefits such as enhanced skin texture, reduced wrinkles, and improved skin elasticity
Another study outlined in BMJ Open is focused on comparing the effects of red and amber LED light on facial aging. This research is designed as a randomized controlled trial and aims to specifically evaluate the reduction in the volume of periocular wrinkles, highlighting the potential rejuvenation effects of red light therapy on the skin
These studies indicate that red light therapy can be a beneficial treatment for improving skin health and appearance, supporting its use in clinical and cosmetic dermatology.”
https://www.jaad.org/article/S0190-9622(19)33160-3/abstract
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/8/5/e021419
IMHO this is a good example of chatgpt providing text without serious value towards answering the question at hand, while suggesting otherwise in the answer.
The first publication is funded by johnson & johnson and describes research performed on donor cells from plastic surgery (i.e. left over tissue from the operating theatre) cultivated in the lab. How well results from this context can translate to the real world is unclear.
The second publication merely describes a protocol for an intended study. It does not indicate nor support anything as chatgpt claims.
Neither of the example publications “demonstrate the effectiveness of red light therapy for skin care”.
https://hackaday.com/2021/12/15/diy-glasses-aim-to-improve-color-vision/
Thanks! Thanks for pasting the output of a machine known to lie and hallucinate! You’ve definitely added to the conversation here!
Tell me in what part did it lie? Did you read the papers?
Did you verify that the claims made by ChatGPT are supported by the papers?
Red light therapy is actually well studied and has demonstrable effects on skin and deeper tissue. It has regenerative effects. It improves scars and speeds up wound recovery (from ulcers for example. It is actually used medically. Look up the medical research about it, it’s real.
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?
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.
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?
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).