After watching hours of your favorite skin care influencers “get unready with me” or reading the latest listicle on your preferred beauty site, it can be tempting to order a new gadget promising to give you ageless, glowy, blemish-free skin. And when many of these devices claim to offer the same results you’d see in a professional’s office for a fraction of the price, what do you have to lose?
However, taking matters into your own hands (particularly with tools that the Food and Drug Administration has not reviewed for safety) can severely damage your skin.
Skin care professionals rely on their years of training, experience and expertise to decide which procedures are suitable for their patients, considering things like surgical and vaccination history, pregnancy, history of scarring and hyperpigmentation, current medications and environmental factors. If, for example, you’re planning a fun-in-the-sun beach vacation, your dermatologist might suggest skipping the chemical peel.
HuffPost spoke to four board-certified dermatologists about eight popular skin care devices that should probably be retired from your shelfie.
5 To Absolutely Avoid
1. Microneedle Dermarollers
Microneedle dermarollers use hundreds of tiny needles to puncture the skin, stimulating collagen production and boosting ingredient absorption with serums. When done properly in a professional’s office, microneedling is shown to help fade hyperpigmentation and acne scars. But despite the numerous beauty stores that sell at-home microneedle devices, these tools can cause far bigger problems for your skin than a few fine lines.
“There are so many things that can go wrong with at-home microneedling,” said Dr. Angela Casey, an Ohio-based dermatologist. “The at-home devices are never sterilized properly, and then the individual is puncturing their skin with the needles. This can introduce infection into the skin.”
And it’s not only the cleanliness of the tool that should concern users. “If…
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