Sarah Vaughter’s dermaroller test & review

The “original dermaroller” is a patented Swiss invention, and the creators only sell to medical professionals for a reason. These rollers are sold to upmarket beauty clinics as a kind of extortion scheme: “If you don’t want to be sued for patent infriction you have to buy our roller”. Apart from the patent, there is nothing special about these “original” rollers. They’re non-autoclavable plastic disposable dermarollers. All the other rollers are “inferior copies”, if we have to believe the producer of the original – but we wanted to verify this claim.

Of the pirates, there is one (Dr. Roller) claiming to be the “Genuine and Official Derma Rolling System”. It is of a slightly better quality than the very best Chinese rollers, and of the same excellent construction as the Original Swiss invention. Dr. Roller is made in South Korea. However we found a high-quality copy of Dr. Roller’s dermaroller – at a much lower price. Because we are brand-independent, we sell both this “clone” and the Dr. Roller dermaroller in our dermaroller store.

We purchased eleven different dermarollers and tested them. One was “dead on arrival”: Its needles had penetrated the blister packaging and some were bent. We found that the needles were of textile-grade steel instead of surgical steel, and the handle was too flexible to apply constant pressure. This worst roller in our test pictured above almost looks identical to the second-best roller in our test, roller E! We did not even test this one further or assign it a letter – we wrapped it in Scotch tape and binned it after taking these photo’s. Update: The SRS Micro Meso roller and the Dermal Integrity rollers both are identical to this roller, except for a fancy looking box.

Note how the needles are in a straight line, instead of “interlinked” or zig-zag. Zig-zag is better, to distribute the pricks more evenly. The three last rollers in our test, labeled H, I and J all have straight lines of needles, and are therefore not recommended. Straight lines are cheaper to manufacture, so some vendors rely on the novice not knowing about this. Roller D’s needles (we bought it from Jaysun trading on eBay) were sticking out unevenly because the individual rings that the needles are sandwiched between, somehow got dislocated during the gluing process:

The very cheapest dermarollers all suffer from the same ailment: Their needles are not made of surgical steel. Model I had one bent needle when it arrived, but one is enough to cause serious skin injury. Think of unhooking a fish the messy way. Its handle is a simple round stick – not ergonomic at all.

Model A is the “original copy”, Dr. Roller. Notice how it looks identical to roller C which we could call a “Dr. Roller clone” – our current test winner, closely followed by model E. We preferred (narrow) roller B and C on aesthetic grounds mainly. The narrow B has a narrow head, which is preferable to a wide head with a raised center with less needles. And now about a big problem with ordering dermarollers online: You can’t be sure the roller in the picture is the same as you’ll actually end up with. Also, G’s handle is different from F’s. That handle is too thin and weak to use. There are a great number of rollers out there and new ones pop up literally every week. To make matters worse, the bad copies imitate the good copies so it’s a quite a lottery, regardless of the price of the roller because the same roller can be priced outrageously high on one website, and half that on another site.

But it gets much more confusing. First of all, the cardboard and plastic boxes are usually “generic”, meaning that the dermaroller factory only produces the roller itself, and they buy the boxes from another factory and print shop. This is the case with the many different MT and MTS rollers out there. Rollers D, E and F are examples of that. The look the same but they come from different factories and their workmanship differs enormously depending not only on the factory but also, it seems, on whether the quality control team had a rough night. Our own experience with some of these rollers attests to that. We had to change factory several times until we found a high-quality supplier for one of our previous testwinners, roller E. Our best selling model currently is an improved version of dermaroller C. More about the test criteria later, first more about the total confusion in dermaroller-land:

On the Internet, you can’t even rely on the brand name of the roller! We found three totally different rollers for sale for wildly different prices, all called “ZGTS roller”:

The same for “Medic roller”:

But it gets even stranger – did you see how the lower-left “ZGTS” roller in the first picture looks the same as the lower-left “Medic roller” in the second picture? And did you notice how the right “ZGTS” roller in the first picture looks the same as the bottom-right “Medic” roller in the second picture?  The situation is even worse for the “MT”, “MTS” and “MNS” rollers out there. A dozen factories all calling their rollers by this generic name (“Microneedle therapy”), using whatever plastic and cardboard boxes are available. It took us a couple of years to start to understand this mess of ever changing factories, agents and advertizing. We came to the conclusion that this mess is deliberate – it is done to parasitize on the “good name” of their competitors.

You have to realize that none of the roller factories sells directly to the public. They do not employ English-speaking people. They are just huge SE-Asian plastic gadget factories. Instead, they sell to mostly unscrupulous agents in the region, who’s only objective is to make a quick buck. Again – we burnt our fingers with that too. The agents all sell under different names on eBay and Amazon and on various websites where they promise miracles with their dermaroller. Please keep in mind that the agents are completely clueless and disinterested in regard to skin care or even dermarolling. They are business people, almost always South-East Asian males around 25 years of age. And then there are the thousands of sites made by anyone interested in the financial side of this market – none of them actually interested in helping people with skin issues – reselling those many dozens of different rollers of questionable quality and even more questionable value for money. Most rollers are ridiculously overpriced.

Test criteria:

We soaked all rollers for a night in Ethanol. We put all rollers in boiling water for a few minutes – do not do this with your roller – it will warp and crack the plastic – we did it as part of the needle resilience tests. We tried to pull out the needles with pliers. We vigorously rolled each roller over hardboard for two minutes and then made a closeup picture of its needles to see if they were still sharp, like this (roller C):

I tried all rollers a little on my thighs. Only rollers A, B, C end E met our demands for a roller with straight, sturdy, durably sharp needles, high production quality and resistance to sterilizing fluids and heat. We paid attention to how easy it is to keep the roller clean. Tiny irregularities in the roller head are hard-to-clean places for skin oils and skin flakes to build up, inviting bacteria. Roller A has a bad price/quality ratio so we took roller C and E in our assortment. Roller C pictured above is virtually identical to roller A at a fraction of its price. Apart from the color and the metal rings on the side, the same goes for roller E. Most of the rollers we sell now are roller C.