The Skin Science Nobody Is Talking About: Scar Collagen, Cold Laser & a Head-to-Head Gene Study

It was one of those kind of turning points in my life, and I was in hospital for weeks, like, while they were battling to save my life. It was such a scary moment. 12 weeks after using the Lima Laser on my knees, they went to this. That was when I realized that this worked like nothing else out there, and if we could re-engineer this huge floor-standing cold laser machine machine into a little portable device, then we could change the beauty industry forever.

Lucy Gough is my guest today. She's the founder of Lima, which is a beauty company that makes lasers. Uh, you're gonna learn a ton about cold laser therapy. Some really cool stuff that she's doing in the whole beauty industry and a really cool story. So, all the shownotes are at BenGreenfieldLife.com/LYMApodcast, L-Y-M-A podcast. And let's go talk with Lucy who is in London. Alright. So, Lucy, I heard because I did a little bit of sleuthing and detective work on you before this podcast that You got into this whole light laser thing after you had sepsis, which is a pretty critical medical condition from what I understand. But I would love to hear the link between sepsis and facial beauty with lasers.

And the light bulb moment. Yeah, no, it was— well, first of all, hi. Thank you so much for having me on today. It was one of those kind of turning points in my life. I'd just had my daughter, uh, everything had gone wrong with the birth. You know, I'd had the epidural, it didn't work. I'd had the spinal, it didn't work. I'd then had a general, I'd had preeclampsia, like everything that could have gone wrong kind of was going wrong. And throughout my recovery, I caught septicemia. It wasn't actually from the wound itself, from the cesarean. It was actually through mastitis. Mastitis turned into cellulitis, which is, um, an infection of the skin. And then that turned into full-blown septicemia. And I was in hospital for weeks, like, while they were battling to save my life. It was. It was such a scary moment. You know, everyone was coming in, nobody could get the infection under control, and I just felt so helpless. And the turning point was, you know, when they first found the antibiotic that was working and they started to see my blood, the infection going down. And I, for the first time, I thought, you know, I was gonna have a life. I would actually, you know, be a parent to my, to my daughter. And I was so elated at that, that it kind of came at the cost of me functioning. I couldn't even pick her up. I couldn't walk up the stairs. And my mom took me to one of these clinics in Switzerland. It was like one of these Heidi moments.

You know, like, I'm curious, which clinic did you go to? I've kind of studied up on some of the European biological medicine clinics over there.

So it wasn't one of the main ones. It wasn't like Viva Maya or one of those. It was a small clinic that her friend had recommended. And this was like my 70-year-old mother who had, you know, only gone to the doctors once in her life to get some antibiotics for tonsillitis, you know. So I was coming at it from a very low benchmark, but a friend of hers had recovered from a similar infection and gone to— it was a very small hospital, only had 9 beds in it, was very, very small. And they were doing my bloods and, you know, they were trying to see what was going wrong because I was eating really well. I was taking incredible supplementation and nothing was, nothing was working. And it was on about the third day when she was so fed up of me, like complaining about how ill I felt. And she got speaking to a professor who was speaking at, uh, at a conference in Geneva, a guy called Professor Paul Clayton, a longevity professor who was an Oxford academic. And he was explaining about the supplement industry and why, um, you know, it, it was a bit like the Wild West and maybe why my supplement stack wasn't working. And he prescribed me some ingredients. They were, it was like 16 tablets I was to take every day. And these were like the hidden at the time category of supplementation. So they were patented ingredients, they were peer-reviewed, they were all dosed properly. And it was a formulation that was really engineered to look at the symbiotic relationship between sleep and stress, which were my main problems at the time. I wasn't sleeping and my body was so inflamed and so stressed from the trauma that it had, that it had had. And he promised me that he was gonna send these, these tablets in the post. And literally, um, 3 weeks later, I get this big pack of pills, popped one every day, and I was thinking, well, I've just got nothing to lose now. And a month later, I just felt myself again. And that was really— I went back to work, and that was really the impetus for starting Lima. We started as a supplement brand, but as a different proposition to the rest of the market.

By the way, when you say you started as a supplement brand, I mean It sounds like these tablets were kind of like for stress or anxiety or sleep. Your company now, from everything I can see, is a little bit more focused on beauty. When you started a supplements brand, was it kind of along the same lines of what this doctor had prescribed to you, or did you guys kind of more focus on the beauty anti-aging piece?

No, it was actually the formulation that Professor Clayton prescribed to me, but he added a couple more ingredients in there for skin. Because he was looking at the symbiotic relationship then between sleep, skin, and stress. So that's how we, you know, if you are not sleeping, you're stressed. If you're stressed, you're not sleeping, your collagen breaks down faster. So kind of looking at that relationship. And then it was in, maybe it was like 18 months later, and Professor, this was like the proper light bulb moment. So he was in Germany and he was looking at a man's knees that had been treated with low-level laser technology to rebuild cartilage inside one of his knees. And there was this whole team of doctors and they were looking at the X-ray of the cartilage increase over a 12-week period. The guy was 60, in his like early 60s. And Professor Clayton was at the other end of the room and he was looking at a photograph of the skin on the knee that had been treated. And it was then that he noticed that the skin on the knee that had been treated looked about 20 years younger than the skin on his other, on his other knee. And that's when he realized the entire beauty industry was really based, you know, it was either LED, which is like, you know, the bulb that's in the ceiling that's amazing at lighting up a room, but it doesn't have biological potential. So, you know, these red light panels that, uh, you know, people stand in front of are really, really effective at getting stimulating the mitochondria on the very surface of your skin, and that gets more oxygen into the body and you feel better. So you feel good when you stand in front of these panels, but the light can't biologically penetrate even into your dermis because LED is not engineered to do that. And if we could re-engineer this huge floor-standing cold laser machine into a little portable device at the same power, then we could change the beauty industry forever.

You could get rid of elephant skin knees worldwide.

You could get rid of— well, actually, so this is the interesting part. I'm going to show you a picture. So when I first tested this technology and we first created the little LIMA laser, I thought, well, I'm not going to test it on my face. My face wasn't so bad. I'm going to test it on an area of my body where it was just horrific skin. It was the elephant knees that I did inherit from my mom. So I had— I don't know whether you can see, but my knees were really not good.

Oh, those are your knees?

These are my knees. Yeah. A few years ago. And then— yeah. And then literally 12— weeks after using the Lima laser on my knees, they went to this.

So you can see, for those of you who are listening, I'll put the video if you go to bengreenfieldlife.com/LimaPodcast. L-Y-M-A podcast. Yeah, definitely not elephants anymore. Holy cow.

Not elephants. And so that was when I realized that this worked like nothing else out there. And the re— you know, uh, the professors that we were working with to engineer the Lima laser, they were explaining that this technology works in a different way to everything else that's out there. It works in a different way to LED. It's way more effective at biological penetration of the light. It's different to normal lasers, so ablative lasers or even non-fracture lasers, because they work by obviously heating the water tissue in between cells or actually damaging the skin in order to stimulate collagen production. And like all these other treatments— microneedling, radiofrequency— they're all heating or damaging in order to stimulate collagen production.

Oh, I know, and you know why? I've been to some beauty clinics before One of my friends is a cosmetic surgeon, Cameron Chestnut up in Spokane, and you can kind of hear the sizzling of the water in the skin. From what I understand, that's the actual water in the skin heating up, which isn't necessarily bad. I know that there's certain effects that those type of lasers have. What'd you call it? I think the one he used He has a CO2. Did you say ablative? Is it an ablative laser?

Yeah. So, the CO2 laser, like an Nd:YAG laser, they take the surface of your skin off. They're ablative lasers.

Oh, I know because my wife did a CO2 and she couldn't leave the house for a month. And again, I'm not throwing that form cosmetic treatment under the bus because I know it does have good effects, but I mean, She was, like, bleeding out her eyeballs for a while. It's pretty extreme.

Yeah, it's very extreme. It's painful. But actually, what we've discovered is when you damage skin in order to stimulate collagen production, your body goes into the stress repair response. So, like, when you fall over and you hurt yourself, your body doesn't say, oh, let's produce a beautiful scar. It just heals as quickly as it can. And it's a very disordered repairing process. So it's a very disordered process. And you don't create the optimal blend of collagen fibers that are found in youth, that your body just produces naturally in youthful skin. Whereas this technology is the only technology out there that whereby the light is absorbed by your cell. And triggers an epigenetic switch inside your cells, and it makes the cell operate as it did when you were just a lot younger. And not only do you produce surplus collagen, but the whole cell itself functions as if you were a lot younger. And that's why this technology is so good, not just for skin, but on, um, muscle regeneration. On inflammation, on pain. You know, like how many people hurt themselves cycling or, you know, doing exercise or just, uh, from operations, you know, like recovering from operations. It's just such an incredible technology. It's a powerful anti-inflammatory and it really expedites the healing process.

So, so playing devil's advocate, back to what you were saying about the more powerful lasers you'd find in a surgical clinic. There's got to be a reason that so many cosmetic surgeons use something like that and that they get good effects from it. So, are you saying that you think you can't get good effects from the more powerful lasers or are you saying you can achieve really good beauty from something at home without that amount of, say, abrasion or damage?

I guess it's kind of horses for courses. There are scenarios whereby, you know, you might— if you're under a surgeon and you're recovering from operation, or as part of the operative procedure, he might do a CO2 laser. But— and that's something different. But if you are just using an ablative laser or a CO2 laser to improve a wrinkle or to improve sun damage or something like that, then there now is no need to use that technology, you know. You can take something like the Lima Laser, you can use the Lima Laser, and literally just all you do is you place it over your skin for 3 minutes, each area that you're treating every day. And it's way better because first of all, you know, your skin is an organ. It's not really there to be damaged. You know, I always remember a conversation I'd had with, with a heart surgeon, and, you know, we were kind of discussing the you know, the concept of damaging your skin just to make it look better, because your skin's an organ that's there to function. And, you know, it just made me think, imagine if somebody went to them, say, you know, can you just like, you know, do a bit of treating to the— to the— to my heart to make it look better? Well, you just would never do that. And yet that's what we're doing to our skin, you know. Yeah, you let pathogens in and it doesn't— you don't need to.

Yeah, I think if you look at something like cardiac remodeling from aerobic stress of exercise or something like muscle remodeling or hypertrophy or, you know, even mitochondrial biogenesis or satellite cell proliferation from the damage you might get from slight tearing of a muscle during exercise. I think you could make a case that small amounts of damage might induce kind of like a hormetic response that allows an organ to regenerate. But, it sounds to me like maybe what you're saying is the type of damage you might get from UVA and UVB radiation from 4 hours in the sun during the day or repetitive, say, I know a lot of people do way too much derma rolling and microneedling and just tearing things up over and over again.

I think whatever you do, whatever your body can create but, you know, for inside your body, through exercise, through your strength, through your resilience, you know, that's— your body will never, you know, that kind of, uh, damage that you were speaking about, that's actually a beneficial damage. That's your body actually pushing itself to become healthier. But I think there's so many cosmetic treatments today that actually, you know, just work off this cyclical Well, you know, the more damage we create, the better the skin's going to be.

It's like the beauty equivalent of overtraining in exercise.

Exactly. And, you know, fundamentally what we've discovered through our research is— and our clinicals— is when you damage skin in order to stimulate collagen production, you're producing the same collagen blend in the same ratio as scar tissue. You're not actually producing the same blend of collagen fibers as found in youthful skin. And that's what the LIMA laser does. And there are technologies like radio frequency and those, you know, other heat-based products that go into the deeper layers and actually cause heat damage in order to stimulate collagen repair that actually create a scarred dermis. They create scarred muscle tissue that sits beneath. And it's only, you know, I remember speaking to Jason Diamond, the, um, the, the plastic surgeon, and he was saying, you know, when they— when he does a deep plane facelift, first place he opens up is, is, is the neck. And you can always see a person that's a patient that has been using these damaging treatments because you can see the state of the, you know, inside the neck and inside the muscle tissue and inside the dermis. That is not harder to do a good operation if you're not working with the best internal structure. So, you know, the light from the Lima laser will go all the way down to your bone and it regenerates the skin, but it also regenerates the muscle that sits underneath this, underneath the skin. And that's why, you know, like for areas like the jowls and the neck, it's so incredible because the skin fundamentally is only as good as the muscle that it sits on top of. So as you age, if your muscles start sagging, then your skin's going to sag too. And that's why the Luma Laser is so incredible, because without damaging anything, it will just make your muscle younger, it will make your skin younger. Just by empowering yourselves to work in the way like it did when you were a lot younger.

Right. So while you're watching, like, YouTube or Netflix or whatever, you could technically go beyond the face and do like you did the knees, the back of the hands, the neck, the knees, the inner arm.

I mean, I'm 53. My inner arms were not what they were, like, areas that just go really thin and crepey as you age. It's incredible. It just gives you the confidence to wear whatever you want to and not even your chest. You get that pillow line from if you don't sleep on your back.

I don't know. I should probably be looking in the mirror more to see if I have pillow lines. It's really popular now, Lucy, these masks, right? The red light face masks. And now they've got them in different colors like purple and blue and green and yellow. Those, from what I understand, and hopefully this isn't a dumb question, I think are LEDs. And, I believe they would also have a different wavelength than something like the laser. Can you do kind of a compare and contrast between a mask and a laser?

So, the masks that you see, they're all LED. So, red light is LED. Anything that's got the word light at the end is LED. It's not a laser. So, you know, you put these masks on and you get these amazing red plume that comes out of them and it, you know, you, they, they look very dramatic. And the reason why you can see that red plume of light is because the light is bouncing off your skin and going into, back into the room. It's not got any biological potential, any biological penetration. And that's because if you, if you want a light source to penetrate beneath the skin, beneath the skin surface, it's got to have 3 properties. It's got to be coherent, which means it runs in a straight line. It's got to be polarized, which means it runs in tram lines, and it's got to be monochromatic, which means it's one color. And those 3 properties are only exclusive to laser light. They're not— that you don't find them in LED. So that's why LED is great to give you a glow. You know, those, those masks are great if, you know, before you go out, if you want to have a glow before, you know, um, or, you know, make you feel better. But they cannot— the light cannot have a biological effect in your dermis, which is the base layer of your skin, or, or your muscle that sits beneath.

Okay, so, so the light's going to cause more like, like a coloration, like a glow whatever, maybe you throw one on before you go out to dinner or something like that. But you're saying it's not actually changing anything structurally.

It is not changing anything structural. And to prove it, we did a world-first clinical a couple of years ago, but was actually published last year. It was published in Aesthetic Surgery Journal, and we took a LIMA laser and we put it over skin and we looked at gene expression in the dermis. Which is the base layer of the skin, obviously. And then we got Imperial College in London to build an identical Lima laser, but we changed at the same wavelength, so 808 nanometers, which is near infrared. And but we got them to put LED as a light source, not laser. It was the same power, same everything. And in the Lima laser skin, 45 genes were expressed in the dermis. And actually, the longevity gene, the SIRT1 gene, was accelerated 6 times. So, it had a huge biological change in the dermis. In the LED skin, only 1 gene was expressed in the dermis. It wasn't the longevity gene.

Interesting. And by the way, the— sorry to interrupt— the SIRT gene, this is the same one people are talking about when they discuss sirtuin-rich foods like polyphenol-rich foods like grape skin or berries or something like that inducing a repair or a longevity response. You saw upregulation of that sirtuin-related gene with the, what'd you say, 808 nanometer?

So, it was the Lima laser. It was with 3 minutes placed on the skin over 5 days. And it was— that has never been achieved before in human skin, in the dermis. There have been some technologies that have done tests, um, in a petri dish, and they've achieved acceleration of like 8 times, but then when they've replicated it in human skin, they've not seen anything. But no, these 45 genes were, were expressed in total in the in the lima laser skin. And I guess it's kind of, there were really 5 things happening at once, like the SIRT1 gene, um, there was mitochondrial function, DNA repair, so mitochondrial fusion, and that just showed that it, you know, the whole longevity side of the, of, of, of the cell had switched on. And then there's the whole antioxidant response. So there was a whole There was a whole other raft of genes that were looking at the antioxidant response. And then there were growth— there was a, there was a growth factor cascade. There was all these genes were working and it, and it showed that there was a total remodeling of the extracellular matrix. In a way that you don't get from a damage. You don't get from a damaged technology. You can only get from, from a cold laser. Because remember, this is a laser light, but it's not, it's not a heat laser. We remove— I don't know if you can see this here, but you know, it starts out at the top as a really hot laser. And actually, in the— when we were engineering the laser, when we were building it, you know, without the internal lenses, you put We put the Lima laser on a credit card and it burns a hole in it in a few, in a few seconds. So it's a really, really hot laser.

So, so don't, so don't buy a Lima laser and tinker with it at home and like remove parts of it. Like, like you, you build it so you don't burn yourself.

Don't take it apart. No, don't take it apart. It will not be—

unless you want to make a Star Wars weapon.

Yeah, don't use it as a Star Wars weapon. Go to a toy shop if you want to use that as a Star Wars It's a lot cheaper. But no, we disperse the central laser beam tens of thousands of times, and that disbursement removes all the heat from the laser by the time you get to the lens. So it's completely cold, and therefore you're not, um, you're not kind of needing the heat to stimulate collagen production. You're just using the natural near-infrared light to work via laser speckle inside each of your cells and trigger this really interesting epigenetic shift inside all of your cells.

When people say cold laser, that's what they mean?

Yeah. So, this is cold laser.

Okay.

This is cold laser, but it's a patented technology. So, it's on another level to any other cold laser. Out there. It's quite interesting actually, because if you think of cold laser, it comes from a diode at the top. So you've always got a diode at the top and then you disperse the heat and then it comes out cold the other end. But the problem with other cold laser technologies is that, you know, you see it in these hats, you know, these cold laser helmets that people wear for, for hair growth. If it's not this technology, you can imagine how thin a laser diode is. It's like less than a, the thickness of a strand of hair. And say you've got 300 5-milliwatt diodes that go on a helmet on the top of your head. You know, 300 laser diodes might be like equivalent to, you know, I don't know, the tip of your thumbnail. Do you know what I mean? Because it just doesn't cover. So fundamentally, you're not, you're not treating a very large surface area, but our patented technology is the first time. I mean, this is the Lima Laser, but this is the Lima Laser Pro, so you can kind of see the difference. This is a lot bigger.

What's the difference between the, the regular and the pro?

Well, for the first time in the Lima Laser Pro, you've got— it's a 33-centimeter treatment lens. You can treat you know, a very large area at once, and it will treat every single nano square, or whatever you call it, of that lens. So the entire treatment lens, whereby in other cold laser technologies you only get the therapeutic benefit where the actual diode is, which is a very small area.

Okay, so if I'm doing— if I'm doing like 3 minutes It takes about 15 minutes to do a whole face, I would approximate. The, the Pro is just going to allow me to go that much more quickly.

Yeah, it's for speed. So the Pro makes you— it's, it's a lot speedier. But the Lima laser is really good if you've got like a scar, if you've got a big bit of pigmentation, or you just want to treat around your eyes. You know, you can get the Lima laser, that's absolutely fine. If you want to start treating larger areas of your face and body quicker, then the Pro is where it's at. But, you know, once you've got one, you know, um, the technology is— it will, you know, if you find that you've got a painful knee or something like that, you know, you can just put it on your knee for 3 minutes and reduce pain. There's so much— it's kind of like the Swiss Army knife of the It's something that everybody should have in their home, not just for skin, but for so many other benefits. Just post-operative or for pain or for to get rid of an old scar, rosacea, pigmentation. There's a whole host of—

actually, that actually the rosacea pigmentation piece, if I could stop you there, and I guess eczema, let's say, like teenagers with acne? Could it do anything for things like that aesthetically?

Yeah, absolutely. So obviously acne is an inflammatory response. So the Luma Laser is a powerful anti-inflammatory and it goes all the way past your dermis. So it's amazing to use for the whole family. Rosacea, obviously it's never going to get rid of the root cause of the rosacea because that's happening from the inside, but it definitely takes down the redness. So the way that the skin manifests itself visually, it will really, really help with reducing the redness in your skin. Eczema, psoriasis, there's a, you know, it just goes on.

I wish I'd have had one when I was a teenage boy. You have no idea how How many times I was like, all right, I look like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer right now on my way to basketball practice with these box on my nose. So you had mentioned the helmet. Could you theoretically, again, let's say you're just like sitting around or maybe you got a Tesla so you can do a little like one hand, almost hands-free driving. Not that I endorse this, I'm just saying it as an example.

You can't do that. If you're sat at home, let's say it another way. If you're sat at home safely on your sofa.

Being driven around. Could you use this on your hair?

Yeah. If you've got a bit of balding at the top of— the way that you use it, you've got to hold it over each section for 3 minutes. So, if maybe you just want to treat two areas that are receding at either end of your hairline, then yeah.

Well, that's kind of what I was thinking was even for a lot of men, I mean, especially Lucy, testosterone replacement therapy is really popular right now. For guys, and one of the side effects is overconversion to DHT, dihydrotestosterone, and that can cause some follicular issues, receding hairline, et cetera. So, let's say a guy wanted to use it just kind of like in this area right here. For those of you not watching the video, I'm kind of tracing around the top of the forehead. You could just do, I mean, honestly with the Pro, that'd be about 9 minutes probably. Do you think it could help with something like that?

Just 6 minutes. So just do either side of, either side of this area.

Yeah, I was just thinking maybe I have a big head, but I was just thinking about total surface area. Yeah, 6 to 9 minutes. You could theoretically do something like that with the Lima.

So for hair growth, for optimal hair growth to stimulate the follicle, you can do it from 8 to 8 nanometers. But there's also a lot of evidence for like 620 nanometers, so a more red light. But actually, the red light that you see on these devices— people think that the Lima laser is a red light, you know, you can see there's a red light there. That's just because it's a near-infrared laser. You can't see near-infrared with the human eye. So this is just the red LED to tell you the device is switched on, because you'd never know whether it was switched on or not otherwise.

Okay. Yeah. And then I noticed that every 3 minutes it like flashes a light. So, you know, oh, and by the way, my wife had a great engineering idea for you. She's like, they should engineer so that it like gives a little vibration every 3 minutes.

Well, do you know what? We did try and do a vibration, but it didn't get past the FDA. That was the problem. So it changed the software on it. And yeah, it— we've tried lots of things, but because this is a really powerful laser and it's a first for the FDA, you know, there, there's some real— obviously it's, it's got— we've got two FDA clearances at the moment, but they're really, really, uh, you've got to follow the— you've got to follow the guidelines.

Okay, cool. I want to, I want to, uh I want to rapid-fire some, again, hopefully not too dumb questions at you as far as just usage and everything. Okay. First one is you guys have these— so, I have a spray and I have a glide. Is that just to help it move around my face better or is there something in these two products that came along with it that help your skin to absorb the light better or something like that?

So, you can use it on its own. You don't have to use it with anything, but if you're using it for skin, The two products it comes with are actually flooded with bioavailable oxygen. So oxygen in its, you know, in its, in a gas form can't penetrate through your skin. And so that's why we, it's, um, it's actually formulated with oxygen in an O4 form. And the O, what we do is we bind oxygen we surround the oxygen molecule with water because your skin can suck water into it. And so the spray has got bioavailable oxygen, and the gel also, which actually is an amazing mask, that's also got bioavailable oxygen.

It feels really good. It's like slime, you know, like those collagen face masks that you get that you put on your face and you lay on your back for a while and they're all slimy. It kind of feels like that.

It's like one of the— it's not, but you know those aloe vera masks that you have when you were younger? It's like, it's just, it's very nice, very soothing. And the reason why we work with oxygen is because it obviously the laser increases circulation on its own, but the oxygen also increases circulation and it just means you get a lot more nutrients into the skin. And it gets more— you have a nice red glow into your skin. It kind of gets it all working. It's like an exercise for your skin, I guess. Yeah.

I don't know if you know the answer to this question, but GHK copper peptide, like that bluish peptide, is really popular now in a lot of skincare products. And these blue pigments absorb light. I'm curious either hypothesizing or even if you know the answer, do you think that if you use something like GHK copper peptide as a topical and then did the laser on top of that that you could kind of activate the GHK and help it to work even better?

Well, it's actually interesting you say that because we are updating our skincare later on just in the summer and it's actually got that copper peptide in. Uh, I know that, that's, that's, that was a fluke. Everything that we use in our skincare is engineered to make the effects of the laser light even greater. And because it works on an epigenetic level, obviously, like, epigenetics is at the top of the tree, as it were, and peptides are further down. So anything that works on an epigenetic level is going to feed into everything that works further down.

So, the eye thing, people wonder when I'm in a red light bed or under a red light panel, should I wear the goggles or the glasses? With the laser, we've established it's not a Star Wars weapon because you've fixed that part. But, especially if I'm doing underneath my eyes, should I keep my eyes closed or avoid having the light hit my eyes?

This is a really clever thing with the LIMA laser. So, in the lens, we have got retina-protected technology, in there. So the lens is equivalent to wearing goggles, and you don't have to close your eyes. It's not dangerous if you look at the— obviously we don't recommend looking at the laser, but if you— it's mainly for the LED that tells you the device is switched on. But no, you don't have to worry about it around your eyes. You don't have to wear goggles. And the reason is in the patented diffusion lens that we've got on the Pro and the, um, and the Lima laser. So it just means that, you know, like you're in the back of a cab, you're on a plane, you're on a train, you don't have to worry about, oh no, I didn't bring my goggles, I, I can't, um, you know, I can't use it.

Plane, is, is TSA cool with this, you think? I, I haven't thought about taking it traveling, but you don't think it'd be an issue?

No. So don't pack it in your case because it's got the battery in it is a lithium battery. So you can't put it in your case, but you can take it in the hand luggage.

So to translate that for Americans, is the case the carry-on or is the case the one that you check?

Ah, yes. So let's decode that. So you can take it with you as a carry-on with you, but you can't check it in. So it goes down the conveyor belt.

Yeah, that makes sense. And then, the 3-minute piece, I initially thought that that might be because if you left it in one place for too long, it could burn. But, since starting this podcast, it sounds like that's just the length of time that's ideal for getting the structural effects. Is that there's no risk if I go 5 minutes?

No. So, there's no risk to go 5 minutes or an hour. There's no risk. You're not going to do any damage to yourself, but you just won't get any better results. And the reason is, is because all the published evidence— so this is not a new technology, you know, cold laser, it's been around since the 1960s in hospitals. You can use it, you know, heal tendons, deal with a whole host of issues. But because we've engineered it to use at home, the dose of laser light that each section of your skin needs to get every day is 12 joules. So that's the therapeutic dose of this wavelength of laser light into your tissue. And that's why you need to hold it over each section of your skin for 3 minutes, because that's going to get you this 12 joules of, of, of, of the laser light, which is the exact point that triggers this epigenetic switch that switches your skin into, into youth mode. Because fundamentally what you're doing is You know, as you age, your body's ability to read your genetic masterboard declines. And it's a slow process. And as you know, like some genes that should be upregulated start to be downregulated, that associated with good things. And some genes that should be downregulated that are associated with bad things start to be upregulated. And it's like, um, it's like a piano going very slowly out of tune. In your, if you are in your thirties and maybe like a few of these genes aren't working in the right way, it's like a couple of notes on a piano not being in tune. You know, you can still play a piano piece and nobody would really notice. But when you're in your forties and your fifties and older, you know, so many of the genes are not working in the right way. And maybe half the notes on the keyboard are out of tune. So when you play the piece, it just sounds dreadful. And what this is, and that's what happens to your skin. There's so many of your cells in your skin that are just not empowered to act like they did when you were younger and produce as much good collagen. And that's why the Limalaser, that's why you need to use it every day for the first 12 weeks or so. Is because you're resetting your genes to work in the right way. And so your skin behaves like it did when you were a lot younger.

It's switching your skin into youth mode. Yeah, the cumulative effect is also a problem in my house because I gave my wife the user manual, like I was telling you before we started recording, and she's using it exactly as prescribed, which means every morning when I wake up, it's really hard to find. Because she's usually on the downstairs couch. So, she gets up in the morning. Well, she gets up in the morning and yeah, she prays, she reads the Bible, she makes coffee, and she's just permanently just got one hand up to her face the whole time with the laser. So, since we got it, you guys sent one to us 2 months ago, since we got it, she's been using it at least 3 times more than I have very consistently. She's in love with it. So, if anything, you've made my wife very happy.

Well, thank you. You should thank me then. Happy wife is everything. But have you— happy wife, happy life. Have you noticed any improve— any— well, obviously, she's beautiful. She might not need any improvement.

Yeah, I have, and she has too, which is great. We haven't done super intense before-after photo tracking, but She usually gives up on something pretty quickly if it's not working for her, and she has been just like every day like clockwork grabbing this thing.

So, I guess if you hide something, you know that you like it.

I know. Then, I would not have a happy wife. Not a bad idea. No. So, if somebody's like, "Okay. So, LLLT, low-level laser therapy, this is great. I'm going to go to Amazon or whatever because there's 200 of these on there." I think you did a decent job explaining how you've engineered it, but I'm assuming that they're not all created equal if somebody does hear this and just goes to grab one.

Oh, absolutely not. No. I mean, you can get cold lasers on Amazon for like $200, but as I was saying, they only work if you get 12 joules of laser light into your dermis or wherever you want to get. Every day. And say, like, the Lima Laser Pro is 1500 milliwatts. It's got a diffusion lens, which means that you can treat every single area of skin along the, you know, along the way. If you're just getting one of those cheap devices from Amazon, you're only getting the penetration right in the center of the device where the laser diode is. And it's low-powered, you're not going to be able to get the correct dose of the laser light to have a benefit.

Yeah. If anything, you're going to be spending— this is similar to a discussion I had about red light panels a couple of years ago where somebody pointed out the fact that, well, yeah, you can get similar nanometer and wavelength, but you don't want to stand in front of your red light panel for 4 hours because it just doesn't have the power.

And I think if we could have made it for $200, We really would've made it for, I mean, the laser diode in the middle, you know, this has got 3 laser diodes in the, the laser diode alone is a lot of money to get a decent laser diode that's gonna last you for 10 years is way more than $200 in itself. So, you know, yes, you can, you can make a cheap version of anything. You know, but actually that's not what we're about. And we're about making clinic-grade, medical-grade devices that are better even than the hospital machine, re-engineering them to find ways of making them better for people to use at home.

Okay, cool. You guys, Time magazine named it world's best invention in 2020 and 2023. '23, when they launched, they had a waitlist of 30,000 people. In 2024, they entered the $211 billion beauty services market. They've got an award for Enterprise for International Trade. They have been named to the Sunday Times, the 100 fastest growing private companies in Britain, one of Europe's fastest growing companies. So obviously this thing is catching on. We have discount if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/LYMA, L-Y-M-A. The code is BEN10 and that saves you 10% off of the LYMA laser. And then, also, I will include some before and after photos, BenGreenfieldLife.com/LYMAPodcast, L-Y-M-A podcast. You can leave your questions, your comments, your feedback for Lucy, or myself. And Lucy, thank you so much for doing this. This is fascinating.

I know. Thank you so much, Ben. It's been a pleasure to watch you walk on an incline up your—

All right, cool. Thanks for watching, folks.

Take care. Thank you.

Do you want free access to comprehensive show notes, my weekly roundup newsletter, cutting-edge research and articles, top recommendations from me for everything that you need to hack your life and a whole lot more, check out BenGreenfieldLife.com. It's all there, BenGreenfieldLife.com. See you over there. Most of you who listen don't subscribe, like, or rate this show. If you're one of those people who do, then huge thank you. But here's why it's important to subscribe, like, and/or rate this show. If you do that, that means we get more eyeballs. We get higher rankings. And the bigger the Ben Greenfield Life show gets, the bigger and better the guests get and the better the content I'm able to deliver to you. So, hit subscribe, leave a ranking, leave a review if you got a little extra time. It means way more than you might think. Thank you so much.