Therabody TheraFace Pro Review: Expensive but versatile

TheraFace Pro He scared me. Made by Therabody—the company behind the popular Theragun devices—TheraFace Pro is the modern woman’s beauty tool, equal in price and prestige to the coveted Dyson AirWreb. This $399 device offers a variety of skin care treatments, from microcurrent and LED light to percussive facial massage. You can also purchase additional heads for heating and cooling treatments.

But you Desire If you’re not all of these, say enter. Top Gun 2? The answer is probably. Skin is the first defense against external bacteria, so many people can stand to take better care of it. It’s hard to know exactly how TheraFace Pro works (if anything), but I really enjoyed my time with it. Despite my initial concerns about the non-contact thermometer-esque device, it made high-end skin care accessible and simple.

Buzz-worthy

The TheraFace Pro comes with six detachable magnetic heads for four different skin care treatments: facial cleansing, microcurrent, LED light, and percussive massage. These heads are controlled by two buttons, a percussion and a ring button, each with three settings that equate to low, medium, and high. It beeps every 15 seconds to let you know how much time you’ve spent on each treatment, except during cleaning.

Therabody is known for soothing treatments, and facial massages improve blood circulation and stimulate lymphatic drainage. There are three percussive attachments that come with the Pro to use alone or in conjunction with red-light treatments. The perforated facial cleansing head also combines with the push button to exfoliate and massage at the same time.

To use Microker, apply Theraon Conductive Gel to your face and massage the area to create a barrier between your skin and the electrical current. Then touch the two metal rings to your face, slide them over your skin and control the current ring button. In theory, the electricity will stimulate your facial muscles to tighten and increase collagen production, your body’s natural protein in the skin to maintain elasticity (among other functions).

The LED light therapy head has three different settings controlled by the ring button: red light, blue light and red with infrared light. Red light and red-plus-infrared microscopically stimulate cells to increase collagen and elastin production, while blue light stimulates the immune system to kill acne-causing bacteria.

You want to avoid actual skin contact to prevent acne-causing bacteria from spreading to your face, so the light treatment starts only half an inch away from your skin. You know it’s working because the light comes on. While you can combine percussive therapy with red-light sessions, you don’t want to combine a percussive session with a blue-light session, as the percussion neutralizes the blue light’s bactericidal effect.

If you buy more of the temperature-controlled heads, you get two additional treatments: heating and cooling. In those heads, it can heat to stimulate pro-collagen production or cool to reduce inflammation and swelling (both at the same high, medium and low settings).

Fact finding

The TheraFace Pro has been cleared for use by the US Food and Drug Administration, which means the FDA has tested the LED-light and microneedle treatments and confirmed the device is safe to sell. Therabody’s clinical trial states that the device has demonstrated 80 percent or greater efficacy and satisfaction across multiple skin care categories. That said, the trial was on a very small sample (35 people), and it’s a good idea to talk to your doctor before you start electrocuting your skin, even with a small wave.

I spoke to dermatologist Jeffrey Hsu to ask if these treatments really work. For the most part, they do, but he had some caveats. For starters, a percussive treatment removes dead skin, but it’s easy to overdo it, and people with thin or sensitive skin may feel irritated. That’s why Therabody doesn’t recommend combining an exfoliating cleanser with a cleansing head.