NZ Skeptics Articles

They See Me (Jade) Rollin'

Mark Honeychurch - 18 March 2024

A couple of months ago a friend messaged me with an article from Glamour magazine that extolled the virtues of jade rollers. Although I have no idea how he ended up reading the article in the first place, I think it piqued his interest because the byline mentioned “skeptics”. Our conversation went like this:

Friend: https://www.glamour.com/story/what-do-jade-rollers-do

See. Per that article skeptics are converted. Is simple, cold pressure pushes lymph to your lymph nodes to remove toxins.

Me: Ooh, I don’t own one of those yet.

Friend: You need one. Though in the name of science I have to insist you only use it on one side of your face and not the other so we can all see the difference.

Me: I’m keen. Would make a good article for the skeptics. Now, where can I buy one cheaply?

Friend: Ali express. Must be the place for ancient Chinese practices right?

Me: Temu might be a better bet these days.

The article, when the link was sent to me, was called “I Asked Jade Roller Obsessives to Convince Me That I Need One”. However at one point it its history it was named “Jade Roller Benefits: We Investigated What Jade Rollers Do”, and it’s currently titled “All the Jade Roller Benefits You’ve Heard Are True”:

(The cynical part of me wonders whether regular renaming of an article might be a clever way to ensure an article stays high in social media rankings, with different titles allowing for re-posting of the same article each time it has a new name. It’s not like Glamour Magazine don’t have other articles on jade rollers that they can promote - “9 Best Face Rollers for Reducing Puffiness, Recommended by Editors”, “How to Use Jade Rollers and Gua Sha Stones”, “Up your at-home facials with a de-puffing jade roller”, “I Gave Myself a Face Massage Every Morning and My Skin Has Never Looked Better” - but I guess, with all the affiliate links in their articles, more article views very likely equates to more money.)

The article made jade rollers sound like a miracle elixir of youth:

“The practice of applying a cold sensation and pressure to an area has been used for centuries because it works without fail,” says Joie Tavernise, aesthetician and founder of JTAV Clinical Skincare in NYC. “It’s simple: The cold restricts blood flow to a particular area, and pressure pushes fluid, known as lymph, to the lymph nodes, which process it and filter out toxins.”

“The real benefit of jade rollers or facial massage is improving circulation and lymphatic drainage, so you look more glowing and less puffy,” says Jennifer Chwalek, M.D., a dermatologist at Union Square Laser Dermatology in NYC. I admit: Damn. “Marma point massage (or Ayurvedic massage), acupressure, or even gentle facial massage, when done correctly to your face, is known to help calm the mind and improve headaches, TMJ pain, sinus congestion, eye strain, and puffiness of the lower eyelids,” she says.

“I have rosacea that I’ve been battling for years, and the coolness of the jade roller really helps to calm my skin.” After using it consistently for three months, she says, she noticed a big difference in her complexion, from how smooth her skin is to the reduced puffiness—and of course, it’s calmer than ever. I find it hard to argue with that.

“Even if you’re skeptical about whether it helps things like circulation and collagen production, it’s good if you want a gentle face massage without all the tugging and pulling,”

There we have it. According to the “experts”, this works both by pushing fluid into the lymph nodes, and draining it out of the lymph nodes. And, unlike the author of the article, I don’t find it “hard to argue” with a single person’s anecdotal experience. I guess I’m more in tune with the last opinion - yes, I’m skeptical about whether a jade roller helps things like circulation and collagen production. I guess I’ll just have to find out if it’s good as a gentle face massage.

My friend continued messaging me, and it looked like I was actually going to have to buy one of these things:

Friend: $16.57 at chemist warehouse

No waiting for delivery

And look. Some useful info about how to use it and the benefits. Which includes the fact that jade crystals have been used to improve skin for centuries. Shortly followed by a recommendation for a jade roller that’s also available in rose quartz and amethyst

The Holland and Barrett article was even worse than the Glamour Magazine article. There was some hand-waving about how YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary):

As for whether they work or not, as with all skincare treatments and routines, the results differ from person-to-person.

For instance, not everyone rollers their face in exactly the same way, using the same pressure and products, and for the same length of time, and at precisely the same day and time of the week.

And then there was an appeal to mystical Qi energy:

Meanwhile, the actual act of facial massage can reportedly increase circulation. The jade itself is also said to draw out any negative energy and balance your ‘chi.’

And, finally, there was a list of 9 supposed benefits:

The first four are strong claims, so it would be interesting to test these out with a totally unscientific sample size of one. However, after these four it looks like the author started to struggle with coming out with more benefits. So we have Easy to use, DIY facial and Minimum fuss, which all sound like the same point reiterated, Pamper time, which is really not saying anything of use, and Improved mood, which I guess is a follow-on benefit from the “Pamper time”, and depends on whether you resent or welcome an extra step being added to your beauty regime. For me, given that I don’t have a beauty regime beyond showering and cleaning my teeth, I feel I’d be likely to resent having to spend an extra minute each day in front of the mirror.

At this point I figured that it might be fun for me to follow through with this, but sadly my local Chemist Warehouse was out of stock. After a quick hunt online, I found one online at Dick Smith for only $9 plus postage. After a chuckle at the idea of something as daft and pseudoscientific as a jade roller being sold under the banner of someone well known for being a skeptic (yes, I know that Dick Smith sold his business - including the right to use his name - to Kogan back in 2016), I added it to my cart and waited:

A couple of days later my parcel arrived, and inside was my very own neatly packaged jade roller:

Now that I had one, what the hell was I meant to do with it? The Glamour article came with a description of how I should roll my face:

Start at the center of your chin, rolling out and up toward your ear. Then move the roller up to the side of your mouth and repeat. Repeat again, starting this time at the side of the nose. Roll it under your eye, moving it horizontally toward your temple, and repeat it on your eyelid. On your forehead, roll it up from your brow to your hairline. Then roll it horizontally out toward your temple. Finally, repeat on the other side of your face.

Ugh, this was way too complicated to figure out. So I looked for a YouTube video instead, and found one immediately that seemed authoritative:

Tina’s technique is simple - use the large side of the roller to roll under the chin, over the jaw, across the cheek, and over the forehead, and then the small side of the roller for under the eyes, across the eyelids and finally over the top lip. I gave it a try, and ended up adopting this daily regime with a small change - rather than finishing with under the eyes, then over the eyes, and finally the top lip, I changed the order to over the eyes, then under the eyes, then finally the top lip. This way I was using the large side of the roller to go up my face, from neck to forehead, and the small side of the roller to come back down again - from eyelid to top lip. This simple regime was simple enough for my simple brain to remember, and quick enough that it wasn’t going to feel too onerous.

And, so, for just under the next two months I rolled my face either once or twice a day. But, contrary to the instructions I’d seen everywhere, I skipped switching over to the second side of my face. Instead, I consistently rolled just one side of my face, hoping that this side would either de-age in front of my eyes, or at the very least that I could arrest its decrepitude, and watch as the opposite side of my face gained wrinkles while the rolled side stayed constant.

Now for the results. For a fair comparison, I took a picture on day one, before I started using the roller, just in case one side of my face already looks older than the other side, which would skew the results. The first image (above or to the left, in the blue flowery shirt) is my untouched, virgin face, and the second (below or to the right, in the white palm tree shirt) is my face after two months of love and attention paid to just one side:

Both pictures were taken under slightly different lighting, so they’re not ideal - although this shouldn’t matter too much, as in both cases you just need to compare the left side to the right side. And I’ve given the jade roller the best possible head start. The before picture was taken after a normal night’s sleep, which for me is about 6 hours. However yesterday I had a horrendous headache and went to bed late in the afternoon, giving me a whopping 16 hours of sleep. So today’s photo is pretty much the best possible scenario - nearly three times my normal amount of sleep.

So, my question to you is: can you tell which side I rolled for two months? Remember, you’re looking for changes in the circulation, skin brightness, puffiness and apparent age of my face. Answers on a postcard, please, to NZ Skeptics, c/o Rationalist House, 64 Symonds Street, Auckland 1010.

Joking aside, if you actually want to let me know which side you think I rolled, I’ve come up with an ingenious plan for using our website to register votes without faffing around with SurveyMonkey or any other nonsense. I’ve made two pages, at https://skeptics.nz/jade/left and https://skeptics.nz/jade/right, and you can visit either of those (or both of them if you think both sides of my face are looking younger!) to register your vote. For the purposes of this experiment, the left side of my face is left from my perspective, so it’s the right-hand side of the image, and vice versa. If you want a closer look at both sides of the after picture, you can see them at: https://skeptics.nz/jade.

We now have Google Analytics turned on for our website so I should be able to capture how many visits there are to each page. Of course this is totally unscientific, as bots and spiders may well find one page and not the other and cause one, creating more synthetic visits. But to an extent I’ll trust Google to both filter those bot visits out, and to let me see unique visitors to each page - so if you attempt to game the system by visiting a page more than once, your cunning plan won’t work. Unless you keep using new IP addresses, in which case well done you, and thank you for caring enough about my poll to want to game it.

Not only is my “experiment” unscientific because my method for collecting votes is deeply flawed, but also of course relying on a single data point as proof, either that it works or that it doesn’t work, is a huge no-no. I could write a whole essay about how anecdotes shouldn’t be trusted (even when they’re our own personal experience), how the plural of anecdote is not data, how any testing needs to make sure that a double-blind placebo-controlled test is used, that both arms of the test are balanced and contain representative populations (or that adjustment is made for any skew), that all protocols, statistical methods, etc are decided ahead of testing and properly documented, etc. But I guess I’d be preaching to the choir by telling you all of that.

Suffice it to say that I know that this fun experiment is not science, and you very likely already know that it’s not science, so from that perspective at least I may have wasted my time. But at least, from now on, when I pooh-pooh jade rollers and some non-skeptical believer challenges me by asking whether I’ve tried one, I can confidently tell them that a) I have used a jade roller, on my face, for two months and b) from my personal experience (which isn’t worth much at all), the roller had absolutely no positive effect on how healthy or youthful my face looked.

If you’re interested in what actual science has to say, then I have some sad news for you. If, like I did, you go looking for robust peer-reviewed large-scale double blinded studies of jade rollers, you’re not going to find any. Instead you’re going to find a few badly written papers that either didn’t bother to perform any actual research (instead choosing to rely on a few prior flawed studies, and just proclaiming that jade rollers work), or studies that were unblinded, with no control group, involving fewer than 15 test subjects, utilising measurement criteria that aren’t even proven to be linked to youthful looks or healthier skin.

p.s. A couple of hints about which side I rolled. I picked the side of my face that faces upwards when I go to sleep lying on my front, which also happens to be the side of my face that people see when they walk past me in the office. Maybe I am a little vain, after all!