LED mask dose calculator
This tool calculates how much dose a device delivers according to the specifications its manufacturer publishes. It is not medical advice and does not indicate what you should use.
At the irradiance each manufacturer declared to the FDA, reaching the dose used in a published trial takes a specific amount of time. That is what this calculates: a division between two numbers published by third parties.
Select a device and a target dose.
Why this tool exists
Of the 60 LED face masks cleared by the FDA since 2021, 3 do not publish their irradiance anywhere — 5% of them. All three are Chinese ODMs with no consumer brand of their own.
Without that number there is no way to know how much light a device delivers in a session, however many LEDs or how much total power it advertises. For those devices the calculator returns no result and says so, rather than estimating one. That a manufacturer does not publish the figure is not a claim about the device or the brand: it means the number is not public.
How it is calculated
time (s) = target dose (J/cm²) × 1000 ÷ irradiance (mW/cm²)
Nothing else. There are no correction factors and no assumptions: if the manufacturer publishes its irradiance and the study publishes its dose, the time is a division. The hard part is not the arithmetic, it is getting hold of both numbers.
When the result is “cannot be calculated”
The calculator returns no number, and does not estimate one from total power or LED count. That answer is as informative as a figure would be: it means nobody — not you, not us — can know how much light that device delivers in a session.
What this number does not say
- It is not a usage recommendation. It is the time this device takes to deliver the dose of one session in that study. The manufacturer publishes its own instructions, and the device usually shuts off on its own before that.
- Cumulative dose is a different matter. The trials ran 8 or 9 sessions; home protocols are 4 to 7 per week over several weeks. The total can be comparable even when each session delivers less.
- More is not better. The photobiomodulation response is biphasic: small doses stimulate and large doses inhibit.
- The geometry differs. The studies used clinic panels, not masks resting against the face.
Where the target doses come from
There are only four targets because we found only two trials that publish their fluence in J/cm². The two best-designed studies in the category — Lee 2007, double-blind with sham light, and Papageorgiou 2000, with 107 subjects and an active comparator — do not publish the dose in their abstracts, so they are not here. For rosacea there is no controlled trial with a published fluence, only case reports, which is why there is no rosacea target.
It is the same absence we point out in manufacturers, seen from the other side of the counter.