About Us

Most red light panels are sold on a mechanism that isn't settled. We'd rather tell you what we actually know.

In 1903, a doctor named Niels Finsen won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for treating disease with concentrated light. He'd built the field out of his own circumstances — chronically tired, living in a north-facing house, convinced more light would help him the way it seemed to help others. Within a few years, forty institutes built on his work were operating across Europe and the U.S.

Then antibiotics arrived, and light therapy quietly stepped aside. Not disproven — superseded. The research didn't stop; it just stopped being the first tool anyone reached for.

Sixty years later, a Hungarian researcher named Endre Mester ran an experiment to see if a low-powered laser caused cancer in mice. It didn't. But the treated mice healed faster and grew their fur back quicker than the control group. That accidental finding — now called photobiomodulation — is the direct ancestor of every red light panel sold today, including this one.

NASA picked up the thread in the 1990s, testing LEDs originally built for plant growth experiments in space, funded research that documented real effects on wound healing and tissue repair.

We're telling you this history instead of a founder story, because it's true and a founder story about us right now wouldn't be. Perilight is a small operation. We didn't invent this science. We didn't discover it. We build a panel using it, and we think you deserve to know exactly where "it" came from and how solid the ground actually is under it.

What we can actually show you

The strongest evidence for red and near-infrared light is in skin — collagen density, fine lines, texture. That's backed by controlled human trials, not just lab studies: Wunsch and Matuschka's 2014 trial measured intradermal collagen density with ultrasound in 128 participants. Couturaud's 2023 study and a 2023 meta-analysis by Ngoc and colleagues both support the same territory.

On safety, a 2023 systematic review in Aesthetic Surgery Journal found no serious adverse events and no cancer association across the major studies, with the most common side effect being mild, temporary redness.

That's the honest map. Some things — the exact mechanism at the cellular level — are still contested in the peer-reviewed literature, and we're not going to pretend otherwise just because everyone else in this category does.