Is red-light therapy worth the hype?

By Regina G. Barber,

Rachel Carlson, Berly McCoy, Rebecca Ramirez

Published September 22, 2025 at 10:04 AM EDT

Red light therapy is growing in popularity as a potential tool for anti-aging, but experts say there is still a lot more research that needs to be done before the full scope of claims about its health benefits can be verified.

The anti-aging product market was worth roughly 53 BILLION dollars in 2024. One of the latest big trends: red light therapy. Social media is rampant with claims about all sorts of purported health benefits to using directed red light regularly … but does the research really live up to all the hype?

For answers, we turn to cosmetic chemist and science communicator Michelle Wong. Together, she and host Regina G. Barber sift through the thin (albeit growing) research on red light therapy to find out which claims are clearly backed by the literature – and which still need a bit more experimental data.

Interested in more science behind skincare products? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org.

Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Berly McCoy and Rebecca Ramirez and fact checked by Tyler Jones. Robert Rodriguez was the audio engineer.