Emilie holding a lit LED mask beside her face, red light falling on her skin

I buy the devices, use them for weeks, and share my reviews.

Everything you’ll find here comes from just one person, and that person is me, Emilie. I’ll explain how LED masks work based on my own tests, along with all the important technical details of the product. There’s no agency behind any of this, and no verdict paid for by a brand.

How I test About me
  • 30+ LED masks tested since 2023
  • 2020 Reviewing beauty products on camera since
  • 190+ Videos published on my YouTube channel
  • 5M+

Two masks at the same price are rarely the same mask

Hold two LED masks side by side and the difference stops being subtle: one throws a dense, even field of light across the whole face, while the other spreads far fewer diodes over the same surface and still sells itself as the same kind of device. Both are marketed as red light therapy, at prices close enough that nothing on either product page would have told you which one you were about to buy.

Emilie holding two lit LED masks side by side, the left one packed with closely spaced diodes, the right one with visible gaps between them
Two masks, both switched on and both sold as red light therapy, though the diodes on the one at right sit noticeably further apart.

The gap runs between brands, and it runs inside them too, because many brands sell multiple versions.

Two LED masks from the same brand lying side by side with their controllers, both lit red, carrying different numbers of diodes over the same face area
Same brand, two versions.

None of that is cosmetic, because fewer diodes spread over the same face means less light landing on your skin, and what a session delivers is exactly that: light intensity multiplied by the minutes you sit under it. That figure belongs on a spec sheet, next to the wavelengths in nanometers and the distance the irradiance was measured at, yet most brands publish none of it, and the ones that do tend not to be the ones shouting loudest.

Every review opens with the same card

The score is out of 100 and comes from my public grid of seven criteria with fixed weights, applied to every mask the same way. Since that grid does not move from one article to the next, you can redo my arithmetic whenever a number looks generous.

A review card showing 68 out of 100, an Emilie Approved badge dated August 2026, and two lists headed Buy it if and Skip it if
How every review opens: the number, the badge it produces, and the two lists most people read before anything else. The figures shown here come from my layout file.

The heaviest criterion is Results, because two months of wearing a mask four evenings a week tells you things no product page can. After that, three others do most of the separating: Irradiance, how much light actually reaches your skin; Coverage, how many diodes there are and where they leave gaps; and Proof, what the brand puts in writing and whether it survives being checked, since anything a brand keeps to itself is a point it does not get.

Every mask I test ends up here and on my social media, worn rather than described.

65 out of 100 is the bar

The badge is the score read at a glance: if a mask reaches 65 out of 100 it is Emilie Approved, and if it lands below that it is Shelved, whatever I happened to think of it on a good day. Nothing else sits behind the number, so you can work the badge out for yourself before you scroll down to it.

  • Emilie Approved

    65 out of 100 or more.

  • Shelved

    Under 65. The review says exactly where the points went missing.

  • Still testing

    The test is running and there is no score yet.

Whether I am still using a device months later is a different question that no arithmetic answers, so every review keeps a dated block at the end for exactly that, and it is the part I would read before the number.

I film as much as I write

Before this site existed I was reviewing beauty on camera, and I have not stopped, so the video below comes from my YouTube channel, where a device gets picked up, switched on and argued with in front of a lens rather than described from a press release.

Latest

Every device I finish testing lands here first.

Where to start

Reviews

One device per page, scored on the same public grid every time.

Best of

Rankings built only from devices I have used myself.

Guides

What the evidence supports, and what the marketing adds.