I test the masks, score them and write every page on this site. This one covers the way a review is put together, and where each number inside it comes from.
How I get the devices
I buy the devices I test unless the article says otherwise, and it says so in the article itself rather than in a footnote at the bottom of it.
Brands do offer. When one does, the review names who sent it, when it arrived, and whether anything was asked for in return. Nothing has been asked so far, and the day something is, that sentence goes in the article rather than on this page, where you would never see it in time.
A device that arrives free is scored on exactly the same grid as one I paid for. The retail price still counts against it in Value, because what it cost me is irrelevant to what it will cost you.
What money cannot buy
- No brand reads an article before it goes live.
- No brand can have a score changed after it goes live.
- No score has ever been adjusted for a commercial reason, and if that ever happens this page will say so.
A brand that spots a factual error can send it to me and I will check it against the source. That is the entire amount of influence available, and it is the same amount whether the brand sells a $500 mask or a $49 one.
Disappointing masks get published anyway. A mask that fails keeps the number it earned and the badge that number produces, and it stays in the archive next to the ones that did well. Shelved is a real outcome here, not a category I keep politely empty.
How a review is built
A review here is the scoring grid, in order, one heading per criterion, and each heading carries its score before you read a word underneath it.
There are seven criteria, always the same seven: Results, Irradiance, Coverage, Proof, Comfort, Value, and Safety and support. Each is rated out of 5, then weighted, and the weighted total is the score out of 100. The weights are published in full on the page describing how I test, and since they do not move from one review to the next, you can compare masks or reweight each criterion the way you prefer.
What that shape costs me is the freedom to arrange a review around whatever a mask happens to do well, since every criterion appears in the same order carrying its number, including the ones the mask fails, and no weighting bends for the occasion.
The verdict sits at the top instead of the end, with the score, the badge, and who should buy it against who should not, all of it before the table of contents, so that thirty seconds on the page is enough when thirty seconds is all you have.
Two sections are not optional. Every review carries a Who shouldn’t buy this block that names at least one kind of buyer who should walk away, with the reason attached, because a warning without a profile is addressed to nobody. And every review ends on a dated Still using it? note, since whether a mask is still in my routine three months later is a question the score cannot answer.
Where the numbers come from
Four kinds of statement end up in a review, and the sentence always says which one it is: what I tested myself, what the brand publishes, what buyers report, and what the research supports. They do not carry the same weight, so they are never allowed to read the same way.
Regulatory wording gets the same care. FDA cleared is not FDA approved, and neither of them means the same thing as an establishment being registered or a product being listed. Those four phrases describe four different situations, product pages tend to blur them into one, and a clearance covers the exact model named in the file rather than the next one along the range.
Nothing here is written in medical language, so a mask does not treat, cure or clear anything on this site, whatever the box says. A study run on a wavelength is not evidence about a device either, and when a brand cites one I go and read who was in it, for how long, and who paid.
What happens when I am wrong
Plenty goes out of date without anyone being wrong. Prices move, ranges get discontinued, and firmware quietly changes what a device does months after it was tested. Every one of the reviews on this site carries a dated update note for exactly that, and I add to that note rather than editing the text above it into agreement with the present.
What I am not
I am not a dermatologist, not an esthetician, and not a laboratory. Nothing on this site is medical advice.
On anything with a real safety stake, eligibility for light based treatment first among them, I say what I do not know and point you to someone qualified to answer it. What I do have is thirty odd masks on my own face and a habit of reading the paperwork, and the about page covers how that came about.