How to Use a Microcurrent Device on Your Face, Step by Step

Before you switch it on

Take off makeup and cleanse, because a device cannot work through foundation and sunscreen, and anything occlusive left on the skin will interrupt the current unevenly.

Tie your hair back and take off earrings and necklaces in the treatment area, which is less about safety than about keeping the conductive layer uninterrupted.

Have your serum within reach and, if your room is dry, a facial mist as well. You will need to reapply between sides more often than you expect.

Check the device is charged. Interrupting a session halfway is the most common reason people skip the second side.

The conductive layer

Apply a water-based serum generously enough that the skin looks visibly wet, not merely hydrated. This is the single most common thing people get wrong, and it quietly costs them results rather than announcing itself.

Hyaluronic acid and glycerin serums work well, as does aloe. Oils, balms and silicone-heavy creams do not, because a barrier layer is the opposite of a conductor.

If your device requires its own gel, use it, since some manufacturers specify one and a warranty may depend on it. If your device takes any water-based serum, as ours do, the bottle you already own is very likely fine, and the two-minute test will confirm it.

Finding your level

Start low and raise it in steps until you reach a setting you can feel clearly as a firm pull rather than a tickle, and which you would be content to hold for three minutes.

Ward and colleagues set out the three thresholds that separate sub-sensory, sensory and motor current, and the practical version for you is simple: at the right level on a motor-capable device you will see the muscle respond, and on a microcurrent device you will feel very little by design.

Do not chase the highest level you can stand. Everything above your comfortable working level goes unused, because the sessions stop being pleasant and then stop happening.

Expect the number to rise over the first month as tolerance builds. Someone still on their week-one setting in week eight is repeating week-one work.

The passes, in order

Start at the jaw. Place the probe near the chin and move slowly along the jawline toward the ear, lifting off at the end and returning to the start rather than dragging back.

Move to the mid-face. Work from beside the nose out toward the cheekbone and the temple, following the direction the muscle runs rather than sweeping horizontally across the face.

Then the forehead, working from the brow upward toward the hairline, in short overlapping passes.

Around the eye, use the lowest level you use anywhere and work on the bone rather than on the lid. If the eyelid flutters, you are too close or too high.

Three minutes on one side, then repeat on the other. Reapply serum before the second side, because the first application will have started to dry.

Where to slow down and where to stop

Slow down wherever the face has actually changed, usually along the jaw and the lower cheek, and spend your three minutes there rather than distributing them evenly out of fairness.

Skip the front of the neck over the thyroid entirely, which is standard practice across the professional world and costs you nothing.

Skip any area with broken skin, active inflammation, sunburn or a recent procedure.

If a spot turns sharp, add serum rather than reaching for the level control, because sharpness is almost always a dry patch concentrating the current.

The serum pass and afterwards

If your device has a delivery mode, run it after the muscle work rather than before, with your serum already on the skin. On our devices that is the Infuse pass, and it runs for the remainder of the ten minutes.

Afterwards, leave the serum on and follow with whatever you normally use. There is no need to wash the face unless the product feels tacky.

Clean the probes before you put the device away. Residue builds up faster than people expect and makes contact uneven within a fortnight.

Run the routine three to five times a week during the first twelve weeks. Kavanagh and colleagues measured an 18.6 percent increase in cheek muscle thickness over a twelve-week protocol, and the repetition is the part that did the work.

This article sits inside our full map of the category, where we set out all 33 devices we track, what each one carries and what each brand publishes: Nine Technologies on One Dial, What the Rest of the Market Actually Carries.