By Sarah Murnane
A few days ago when scrolling through instagram reels, I came upon a clip of Hannah Fry on a podcast. Hannah Fry is a fairly well-known British mathematician. She actually started out doing comedy, which led to a career in broadcasting primarily on the topic of maths and science. She appears on The Rest is Science weekly and across the internet and media doing interviews and talks. In essence, everything I knew about Fry was positive and she seemed like a reasonable person. In this clip Fry is discussing the various skincare she partakes in, one of which is red light therapy.
Red light therapy are the funny looking white masks you see in fancy department stores and online. A quick Google indicates that these companies claim that by exposing your skin to doses of red light can help with healing scars, dark spots and overall skin health. Fry claims that there are peer reviewed studies to show this.
Well, I looked at those studies, and they are deeply flawed. They rely on small sample sizes, different doses, none use commercial red light therapy masks and instead were tested in specific conditions.
Fry can do and say whatever she likes of course, and maybe there is evidence that I have not found. However, what made me sad was I bet there were thousands of other women who saw that, respected Fry and went and spent their money on something that probably won’t work. Every year another form of beautification is added to the already growing list of things that women must do to be beautiful and youthful, and most of it doesn’t make a difference.
More importantly, if a person as smart and interesting as Fry can fall victim to needing to invest in products to aid their appearance, it only goes to show how backwards the world remains. I highly doubt there are any male mathematicians out there touting the benefits of red light therapy.
Let this be a lesson, in the words of Ronald Regan “Trust, but verify”.