Published 19th March 2025
Red light therapy: Does it improve skin health?
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Red light therapy seems too good to be true. Some claim that simply by shining a red light on your skin, it can provide “miracle benefits at home.”
These miraculous benefits include rejuvenating your skin, boosting mental health, helping you recover after exercise, improving sleep, and more.
As ever, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. In the case of red light therapy, though, it’s a bit more complicated. For certain conditions, there is some evidence of benefits.
Although scientists need to carry out much more research, red light therapy could help some people, and because there are no side effects, it’s worth trying.
So, strap in, and we’ll investigate whether red light really can improve your health.
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What is red light therapy?
In a nutshell, red light therapy involves exposing your skin to low levels of red light. This might be done in a clinic or using a commercially available red light at home.
Red light therapy is a form of low-level light therapy, which goes by many names:
biostimulation
cold laser therapy
low-power laser therapy
non-thermal LED light
photonic stimulation
photobiomodulation
phototherapy
soft laser therapy
In theory, red light therapy works by upping the activity of your mitochondria, which produce the energy your cells need to work.
Scientists have studied red light therapy’s effects on a number of conditions. And although the evidence isn’t compelling in most cases, some experts consider it promising.
Some clinics already provide red light therapy, and you can buy red lights to use at home.
However, as the authors of one study write, red light therapy’s “ubiquity and commercial success have outpaced empirical approaches on which solid clinical evidence is established.”
In other words, it’s widely available but the evidence is still relatively weak.
This is often the way with innovative treatments. If they’re relatively cheap, safe enough to not need regulation, and simple to conduct, people will use them whether the evidence is there or not.
Next, we’ll look at some specific claims and the relevant research. Before we get going, we should mention that most of the studies we cover below are small, and many of them are funded by companies that manufacture red light therapy devices, which can introduce bias.
Also, some studies use standard red lights, some use LEDs, and others use both, which makes it difficult to compare the results.
Similarly, researchers use quite different protocols. For instance, some test just one 2-hour long red light session, while others ask participants to use red light therapy for 20 minutes per day for 2 weeks.
Acne
Acne is one of the most common skin conditions worldwide. It occurs when dead skin cells and oils block hair follicles. A range of treatments is available, but they don’t work for everyone, and some have unpleasant side effects.
A 2021 review of 13 randomized controlled trials concluded that red light therapy was roughly equivalent to standard acne treatment.
Standard acne treatments are often antibiotics, and because antibiotic resistance is a large and growing concern, red light therapy might be a useful replacement for these drugs.
But before we get too excited, a 2024 Cochrane review — the gold standard in evidence-based healthcare — concluded that there was no “high‐certainty evidence” that red light therapy (or other light therapies) helped treat acne.
Eczema
Eczema, or atopic dermatitis is another very common skin condition. As it stands, there’s no good evidence that red light therapy can help treat eczema.
However, red light therapy might reduce inflammation — an important factor in eczema — so some clinics do use red light regardless of the lack of evidence. Because there are no side effects or risks, it’s worth trying.
Blue light therapy may be effective for eczema, so sometimes clinicians will use both blue and red light together.
Psoriasis
Psoriasis, characterized by scaly, red patches of skin called plaques, affects 2–3% of the global population.
There hasn’t been much research into the use of red light to treat the condition, but the authors of a review write that the results so far are “encouraging.”
However, as with eczema, blue light may be more effective than red.
Anti-aging and rejuvenation
One of the most common marketing claims is that red light therapy can slow skin aging and bring back that youthful glow. Perhaps surprisingly, there is some evidence that it can reduce signs of aging.
One fascinating study investigated red light on the appearance of aging skin and some biochemical markers of skin aging.
As skin ages, levels of collagen, which gives skin its elasticity, tend to reduce. At the same time, levels of matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) — which breaks down proteins like collagen — increase.
Using a model of human skin (so not a whole human), the scientists found that pulsed red light increased collagen levels and decreased MMP levels.
In the second part of their study, the researchers recruited human participants. They found that red light treatment reduced the depth of wrinkles and made skin smoother.
Another study involved 20 people who used a red light face mask twice each week for 3 months. The scientists found that after 1 month, wrinkles were shallower, and the skin was firmer and smoother.
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While these results seem exciting, the study didn’t have a control group, and two of the authors work for a company that sells red light masks.
That doesn’t mean we should discard the results entirely, but it’s certainly worth bearing in mind.
Overall, according to a review, “Red/near-infrared light exhibits the potential to rejuvenate the skin.” However, the author calls for more research and discloses that he is a consultant for a company that sells light therapy devices.
Hair loss
Scientists accidentally identified links between red light and hair growth in the 1960s. While investigating whether low levels of red light caused cancer in rodents, scientists found that the animals got hairier (but didn’t get cancer).
There is some evidence from human studies that red light might help slow or reverse hair loss for some people. For instance, one study involved 41 participants who used a “bicycle-helmet like apparatus” with red laser and LED lights in it for 16 weeks.
Compared with a placebo helmet (which looked the same but didn’t use red light), those with the red light helmet had 35% more hair growth. Another study on 42 females produced similar results.
As you might have already guessed, some of the scientists involved in both of these studies are connected to a company that makes light-based hair loss treatments.
Importantly, not all researchers have found the same benefits of red light therapy. There’s simply not enough good-quality research.
Also, there’s great variability in the strength of red light devices — especially those available commercially, and it seems that not everyone responds to treatment in the same way.
Sleep
Although companies that sell red light devices often claim it improves sleep, there has been very little research.
One study recruited 20 athletes. For 14 days, half of the participants lay in a whole-body red light device for 30 minutes each night. The remaining participants lay in the same device but without the lights on.
Those who experienced the daily red light reported better sleep quality and had higher levels of melatonin (a hormone that helps regulate sleep).
Another small study on stroke survivors concluded that daily exposure to blue light was better than red light for reducing daytime sleepines.
And another study on people with Parkinson’s concluded that being exposed to bright white light or dim red light for 2 hours each day for 14 days improved sleep quality.
Some of these results are encouraging, but so little research has been done on red light and sleep that we can’t draw any conclusions.
Exercise recovery
A 2013 review of 13 studies investigated whether light therapy could help speed up recovery after exercise. Because the studies were small and they were all run quite differently, it was difficult to draw robust conclusions.
However, overall, the authors concluded that red or infrared wavelengths used before exercise had the “most significant and consistent results.”
Another review, this time published in 2019, explains that the benefits of light therapy on muscle recovery are growing clearer. Although one of the authors was funded by a light therapy device manufacturer.
And the authors of another review on the topic concluded that “low-level phototherapy may not have substantial effect in the treatment of skeletal muscle injury and pain caused by exercise.”
So, the jury is out.
On the topic of aches and pains, some claim that red light therapy can help treat low back pain and neck pain, but the evidence so far is weak.
Summary
Overall, there’s some evidence that red light exposure might support some aspects of skin health and improve hair growth.
There’s weaker evidence that it might speed up exercise recovery and influence sleep.
As we mentioned at the top, red light therapy is risk-free, so it’s worth trying, but the effects are unlikely to be miraculous and some of the commercially available devices can be expensive.
So, choose what you spend your money on to improve your health wisely.
