What Is LED Light Therapy and How Can It Benefit Skin? | Choicy Beauty- a beauty training academic

When you you hear the term skin-care routine, chances are, products like like cleanser, retinol, sunscreen, and maybe a serum or two come to mind. But as the worlds of beauty and technology continue to intersect, the possibilities for our at-home routines are also expanding. Increasingly, skin treatments previously only available in a professional's office are making their way into our medicine cabinets via a slew of high-tech tools and devices.

One buzzy example is Led Light Therapy, which has been said to help with a laundry list of skin issues, including everything from acne and inflammation to fine lines and even wound healing. And though it might be trending, LED light therapy does, in fact, live up to the hype - whether you try it at home or seek out a professional.

But how does LED light therapy really work? What sort of skin benefits can it actually provide? And are LED light masks safe for at-home use? We asked board-certified dermatologists to break down exactly what you need to know about LED light therapy.

What exactly is LED light therapy and what does it do?
LED light therapy is a non-invasive treatment that utilizes different wavelengths of infrared light to help treat various skin issues such as acne, fine lines, and wound healing. It was actually first developed for clinical use by NASA back in the nineties to help heal astronauts' skin wounds - though research on the topic continues to grow, and support, its many benefits.

"Without a doubt, visible light can have powerful effects on the skin, especially in high-energy forms, such as in lasers and Intense Pulsed Light (IPL) devices," says Daniel Belkin MD, a board-certified dermatologist based in New York City. LED (which stands for light-emitting diode) is a "lower energy form," in which the light is absorbed by the molecules in the skin, which in turn "alters the biologic activity of nearby cells."

In slightly simpler terms, LED light therapy "uses infrared light to achieve different effects on the skin," explains Michele Farber, MD, a board-certified dermatologist based in Philadelphia, PA. During a treatment, "wavelengths in the visible light spectrum penetrate the skin to varying depths to exert biologic effect." The different wavelengths are key, because this is "what helps make this method effective, as they penetrate the skin at varying depths and stimulate different cellular targets to help repair skin," explains Ellen Marmur, MD, a board-certified dermatologist in New York City.

What this means is that the LED light essentially alters the activity of skin cells in order to produce a variety of agreeable outcomes, depending on the color of the light in question - of which there are multiple, and none of which are cancerous (because they do not contain UV rays).