A few years ago, red light therapy started popping up everywhere I looked, and it’s still getting a lot of attention. Fitness Influencers preach it for muscle recovery, fat loss and metabolic health. Beauty influencers say it will give you glowing skin and thicker hair. The Biohacking bros claim it can help your mood and sleep, and that if you expose your balls to red light, it will increase your testosterone.
Thanks to social media publicity, gyms have started installing red-light booths next to the tanning bed. Just a few months ago, a dedicated red light studio opened near my neighborhood here in Tulsa. $50 gets you 25 minutes in a red light booth plus 10 minutes in something called a “power dish.” You can now buy red light therapy panels and blankets for your home, but they don’t come cheap. Serious home red light therapy can set you back $1,000 to $2,000.
As a creaky, stiff 43-year-old garage powerlifting veteran with grumbling tendons, I was intrigued by the promises of pain relief and faster recovery. Potential mood boost was also a plus. Instead of going to a tanning studio and shelling out upwards of $30 a pop for red light sessions, I decided to buy a red light blanket—essentially a sleeping bag lined with therapeutic LEDs—to do an experiment on myself and then share the results.
Five times a week for three months starting in January, I put on my birthday suit, crawled into my expensive red-light wrap, and lay there on our playroom floor for 15 minutes. About halfway through my session, I was squeezing my body so the bag was covering my head as well, snuggling up like I was in my mummy’s sleeping bag on a cold camping night. One morning, my son wandered in to find only my gray head sticking out of my bright red cocoon. Gus finding his father doing strange things for his husband’s blog is nothing new. “You look weird,” he said flatly and left. He wasn’t wrong.
I’ll let you know below if my experiment worked. But first, let’s take a look at how red light therapy works and whether its widely touted benefits are supported by research-backed evidence.
What is red light therapy?
Red light therapy, or photobiomodification (PBM), involves exposing tissue to specific wavelengths of red and near-infrared light to stimulate cellular function, specifically your mitochondria. When cells are stressed, a molecule called nitric oxide clogs a key enzyme in the mitochondrial chain, suppressing ATP production. ATP is the energy currency our cells use for repair and regeneration. Red and near-infrared light can remove this nitric oxide and re-activate cellular energy production, allowing your body to repair and regenerate. That’s the theory at least.
When doing red light therapy, there are two kinds of wavelengths that provide different benefits.
Visible red light in the 630-660 nm range is mostly absorbed by the dermis and epidermis of your skin.
Near-infrared light in the 810-850 nm range, on the other hand, passes through the skin and can penetrate several centimeters into muscle tissue and joints.
If you’re dealing with a skin concern, you want visible red light. If you’re treating a joint or trying to reach deeper tissue, you want near infrared. Most quality panels provide both, mainly because it makes them more versatile — you can use the same device for skin, joint and deeper tissue work — which is why they’ve become the standard for wider therapeutic use.
Purported benefits of red light therapy
When I dug into the research on red light therapy, I discovered that, like many health fads, the marketing and social media hype surrounding red light therapy far outweighed what the science actually supports.
There are some benefits of red light therapy, but they are much narrower than the guys at Reels who wear blue light blocking glasses claim.
Red light therapy can improve your skin
Wavelengths in the 630-660 nm range penetrate the upper layers of the skin and stimulate fibroblasts, the cells responsible for the production of collagen and elastin. Meta-analyses have found strong evidence that PBM reduces radiation dermatitis—skin irritation and damage caused by radiation therapy exposure—in cancer patients. There is also evidence that it accelerates the closure of chronic wounds such as diabetic ulcers.
For general antiaging applications, exposure to red light can reduce wrinkles and improve skin texture over time.
But to get the benefits, you have to do red light therapy consistently for a long time. We’re talking three to five sessions a week for three to six months before you see any changes. It’s not a quick fix.
Red light therapy can help with hair loss
If you suffer from androgenic alopecia (also known as typical male pattern hair loss), the evidence for red light therapy is pretty solid. Low-level light stimulates mitochondria in hair follicles and increases blood flow to them. Studies have shown improvements in hair density and thickness in both men and women after three to six months of consistent treatment.
The catch: you have to continue red light treatment indefinitely to maintain hair growth. Stop the sessions and the follicles will return to their previous state. So you have to decide if a modest improvement in your hairline is worth wearing an $800 red-lit helmet that looks like something out of Minority report every day, indefinitely.
Red light therapy can relieve localized pain and inflammation
For specific, targeted musculoskeletal problems—knee osteoarthritis, plantar fasciitis, localized joint inflammation—there is decent evidence to support red light as an adjunctive therapy. Near infrared wavelengths of approximately 810-850 nm can penetrate several centimeters into muscle and joint tissue and have been shown to suppress pro-inflammatory cytokines and reduce pain. Again, you have to use red light therapy consistently for months before you see any benefit. It is not something that is done in isolation. It’s also a “complementary” treatment, meaning you have to do it alongside physical therapy to get the benefits.
There are devices you can buy that you can attach to areas you are trying to treat. They are more economical than panels or full body blankets. Still not cheap though! Look at spending $400-$800 for these.
Red light therapy can speed up muscle recovery (but probably doesn’t do much for muscle growth)
Multiple meta-analyses—including reviews published in 2024 and 2025—show that red light therapy consistently reduces blood creatine kinase levels after vigorous exercise. Creatine kinase is one of the main markers for muscle damage, so reducing these levels faster means your muscles repair faster. The same research shows consistent reductions in delayed onset muscle soreness, or DOMS.
The question of muscle growth is murkier. Recent meta-analyses indicate that PBM does not consistently increase maximal strength beyond what training alone produces, and there is no indication that it will do much for hypertrophy.
Red light therapy probably won’t help you lose fat
This is a favorite claim of fitness influencers and the evidence behind it is the flimsiest. The theory is that PBM causes temporary pores to form in fat cells, releasing triglycerides to be metabolized. Small studies have documented modest reductions in girth, but these have not translated into significant changes in total body weight, and without a caloric deficit, the released fat is likely simply reabsorbed. No large-scale, long-term human trials support the idea that red light significantly accelerates fat loss beyond diet and exercise.
Red light therapy probably won’t improve your mood or your sleep
Research into transcranial PBM for conditions such as depression and Alzheimer’s looks promising, but is still in its early stages. It’s worth watching over the next decade.
But systematic reviews have concluded that sleep quality and cognitive improvement in healthy subjects using red light are not yet statistically significant.
If you notice any mood elevation from red light therapy, it’s probably the placebo effect, which has a real impact. If you feel better, you feel better, but red light therapy is a pretty expensive and time-consuming way to get the placebo effect. You can get a mood boost just by walking outside and catching some sun.
In this testosterone claim
The evidence that testicular radiation boosts testosterone in men comes almost entirely from rat studies. Human data is essentially anecdotal. I would file this under things that work on rats and for the TikTok bros who want you to break that like button.
Did Red Light Therapy do anything for me?
After three months of spending 15 minutes 5 times a week under my red light blanket, here’s what I found:
My mood did not improve noticeably.
My nagging tendons were still nagging me.
My skin looked exactly like before, that is, like the face of a 43-year-old man. A scar I got at Thanksgiving has stubbornly remained.
I didn’t lose body fat.
My recovery from workouts didn’t improve.
My hair, which was already thick, stayed thick.
I can’t say for sure that the red light therapy didn’t do anything for me, but the effect wasn’t significant or noticeable enough for me to continue to spend over an hour every week lying on the playroom floor in a glowing body bag.
That’s how it should be You Do you do red light therapy?
Red light therapy didn’t seem to do anything for me, but this was of course an n=1 experiment. Your results may vary.
If you have a specific problem that the research supports—hair loss, age-related skin changes, a nagging joint problem—a high-radiation red light device used consistently over several months might be worth investigating along with everything else you’re doing for it. There is research to support this. But keep in mind, even when it works, the benefit is usually modest and if you have to do the light therapy consistently for months – and in the case of hair loss, forever.
For general wellness, total body recovery, fat loss and mood, the evidence is lacking. However, at least.
My takeaway: if your gym has free red light therapy, it won’t hurt to sit in it for a few minutes after your workout. just don’t expect much from it.
I wouldn’t spend the money to go to a specialist red light salon or an at home red light therapy device unless you have money burning a hole in your pocket and don’t mind losing the aura in your teenage son’s eyes.
