LYMA Laser PRO

"I really love this laser. I want to say that before anything else, because I am about to be hard on the company that makes it, and I do not want the two confused."

"I bought the PRO at retail after living with the original long enough to know I would keep using it. The box is heavy the way expensive things are heavy. Inside is a matte black wand about the length of my forearm with a wide glass window at one end, an aluminium stand it clicks onto magnetically, a silk pouch, a bottle of mist, a bottle of gel, and a copper card that makes you feel like you joined something. It is the best-looking object on my dresser and there is a lot on my dresser."

"The routine is simple enough that I never looked it up twice. Six pumps of the mist, which is essentially oxygenated saline and has three ingredients. Then the gel, cold and clear and slightly tacky. Then you hold the window flat against your skin and wait. The light tells you when three minutes are up. Forehead, one cheek, the other cheek, jaw, neck. My whole face and neck in about ten minutes, sitting on the edge of the bed with something on in the background. The original took closer to half an hour and I was moving the wand the entire time. This one covers a whole cheek in one hold, and that is the difference between a device you use and a device you own."

"There is no heat. None. I keep telling people this and they do not believe me until they try it, because everything else in this category is hot, or stings, or leaves you red. This leaves you faintly pink for ten minutes, the way your face looks after a walk in cold air, and then nothing. I close my eyes for the holds around them, as the book says, and I have never felt a thing. I have used it after retinol, after acids, and once on a sunburn when I was not thinking, and it has never made anything worse."

"What it did, over months rather than weeks, was texture. The lines across my neck softened first, which I did not expect and noticed in a photograph before I noticed in a mirror. The crease between my brows is shallower. My skin looks like I sleep more than I do. The backs of my hands, which I started doing because the evidence on hands is better than the evidence on faces, look about five years younger than the fronts. I did not lose a wrinkle. I do not think anybody loses a wrinkle. I think you get skin that looks rested and dense and even, and that is worth more than a wrinkle anyway."

"Now the hard part. I read the one real paper on this technology and it is a good paper. It is also about the previous device at a third of this power, it used skin from one donor, and it sorted twenty wound patients by flipping a coin. It says the company paid for it and that two of the authors own shares. Fine. That is disclosed, and disclosed properly. But the product page turns that single-donor gene panel into our clinical trials proved what everyone said was impossible, and the numbers it leads with, 103 percent this and 46 percent that, come from trials I could not find published anywhere. Nothing at all has been published on the PRO. The reviews page shows nobody who was disappointed."

"And the site says LYMA products have no known side effects, while the FDA holds a report from a woman who burned both cheekbones on the old device and spent three weeks on eye ointment. One report in years of sales is a very good safety record. Saying there are none is not honest, and this device does not need the help. And this is not only my opinion. In June 2024 the UK advertising regulator upheld a complaint against this company on all three points raised, over claims that the laser was the world's most powerful home beauty device and a hundred times more effective than LED masks. LYMA submitted two studies in its defence. One of them measured wound healing in cell cultures including mouse fibroblasts and compared two lasers against each other rather than against an LED. The regulator said so, in public, and told them to stop."

"The filing also states a window of 20 square centimetres, power of 1400 milliwatts, and a daily phase of eight weeks. The site says 30, 1450, and twelve. Small things. But if you are going to lead with decimals, get the decimals right."

"One more thing, about the two bottles that come in the box. The mist is water, oxygen and salt. Three ingredients. LYMA calls it one hundred percent Active Stabilised Oxygen and says it is a hundred times more effective than an oxygen facial, and I could not find anywhere on their site or in any study what Active Stabilised Oxygen actually is chemically, how concentrated it is, or where that hundred times comes from. I looked at the published research on putting oxygen on skin and almost all of it is about healing wounds, not about ageing. I use the mist because the laser needs a conductive layer and it does that job. I would not buy it for what the label says it does."

"And the thing that decided it for me. LYMA's own website says that when a wellness company tells you a product is clinically tested, it means they paid for a private trial, and that those results cannot be trusted, and that the industry does not trust them and neither should you. I agree with them. The numbers on this laser's own product page come from exactly that kind of study."

"So two stars, and I want to be precise about why it is two and not three. The two are for the object, the method, and the fact that months later it is still on my dresser and still in my routine, which almost nothing in this category can claim. The third star is sitting on a desk in London waiting for someone to publish the elasticity trial, run one study on this device that the company does not fund, say where the thing is made, and take one sentence off the website. None of that touches the laser. The laser is finished. The paperwork is not."