I’ve tested the devices clients keep asking about

I’ve used each of these on my own face for at least eight weeks, and I’ve watched clients bring them into the room for years. So I see the skin of someone who’s been using a device consistently. And the skin of someone who used it four times and put it in a drawer. Observation rather than a trial, and I won’t pretend otherwise.

I’m also not naming brands. Partly because the market changes every six months and this page would be wrong by Christmas. And partly because I’d rather you understood the category than bought the one I mentioned.

The category with the most published research behind it, and the one I’m most comfortable recommending. Red and near-infrared light have a reasonable evidence base for supporting the skin’s own repair processes. Blue light is aimed at the bacteria involved in acne, and the support for that is more modest.

The catch is dose. Clinic devices deliver considerably more light per session than most home masks, so a home mask is a smaller intervention repeated far more often. That’s fine. Arguably better. But it does mean three uses a week for four months, rather than a fortnight of enthusiasm. If you already know that won’t happen, buy something else.

Buy one that covers the whole face without being held, because anything you have to hold gets used for ninety seconds. Wear the eye protection supplied.

This is the one where my experience and the research part company slightly. The published evidence for lasting change from home microcurrent is thin. What I see is that people who use it four or five mornings a week look better in the mirror by the end of the week. And that the effect fades within days of stopping.

I think it’s genuinely temporary, and I think temporary is allowed to be worth something. If you want to look a bit more awake for a specific evening, it does that. If you’ve been told it lifts the face permanently, that isn’t what it does. And no home device does.

It needs the conductive gel. Used dry, it does nothing at all and can be uncomfortable.

Home radiofrequency devices are deliberately limited in the energy they can deliver. A sensible safety decision, and also the reason they underwhelm. In clinic, the point of radiofrequency is reaching a target temperature in the tissue. A device engineered so that nobody can burn themselves at home is, by design, working well below that.

My honest position: this is the category where the gap between price and effect is widest. If you’ve already bought one, use it as directed and don’t increase the frequency to compensate.

Sonic silicone devices are broadly harmless and, for most people, unnecessary. Bristled rotating brushes are a different matter. I’ve seen more barrier damage from those than from any other item on this list. Usually in someone who was told their skin was congested and started using one twice daily.

Skin doesn’t need mechanical scrubbing to be clean. If your cleanser needs a machine to work, the problem is the cleanser.

Cheap, pleasant and modestly useful. Cold reduces the look of morning puffiness for a couple of hours, which is real even though it’s brief. Gua sha, done slowly and with enough slip, moves fluid and releases jaw tension. That’s why it feels good on the neck rather than the cheeks.

Done fast, hard and dry, it drags the skin and irritates it. The pressure should be closer to stroking than to scrubbing. Five minutes, always towards the neck.

Home microneedling rollers. This is the only category on the page I’d rather didn’t exist.

The needles blunt quickly and then tear rather than puncture. They’re difficult to keep genuinely sterile in a bathroom. People roll harder than they should, because it doesn’t hurt enough to stop them. And then they follow it with a serum containing something that was never intended to enter the skin through a channel.

The scarring and pigmentation I’ve seen from home rolling has been some of the hardest to improve of anything that comes through the door. It’s spread evenly across the whole face rather than confined to where the original marks were. If you own one, please put it in the bin rather than in a drawer.

Buy a light mask, and buy it only if you’ll use it three times a week for a season. Everything else on this list is optional, and one or two are worse than nothing.

And spend the money you didn’t spend on a sunscreen you genuinely enjoy putting on. It’s the least interesting sentence in skincare, and it’s still the one that changes the most.