We Claim No Benefits

AriHelder — Red Light Routine

There are over a thousand clinical studies on red and near-infrared light. Our founder Arjen Helder has read hundreds of them and reviewed most of the rest. He built the world's first wearable red light therapy device. He's been designing and studying photobiomodulation devices since 2017. He knows the science better than most people selling it.

And after all of that — we've decided to claim nothing.

No miracle promises. No cherry-picked research papers. No "backed by Harvard." No "developed from NASA technology." No celebrity endorsements telling you what happened to their testosterone.

Just a precisely engineered tool, honest specs, and a community of real people sharing what they find.

This is our launch. And we think it might change how this entire industry works.

Three Kinds of Red Light Brand

If you've been shopping for a red light device, you've probably noticed the market is confusing. That's because there are fundamentally three different kinds of company selling into it, and they look similar on the surface but work very differently underneath.

The first kind is marketing-driven. These are the cheapest devices — the ones flooding Amazon and Alibaba listings with walls of claimed benefits. Skin rejuvenation, collagen production, muscle recovery, testosterone support, brain health, fat loss, wound healing. Every claim hyperlinked to a study. Click on those studies and you'll find something interesting. Most were conducted with clinical-grade laser equipment costing tens of thousands of dollars — not the $79 LED panel being sold on the page. Many are in vitro studies, performed on cells in a petri dish, not on a human body. A good number are animal studies. Some don't even use the same wavelengths as the product being sold.

These brands are built by marketers, not engineers or clinicians. They cherry-pick research, copy-paste spec sheets from their OEM supplier, and race to the bottom on price while piling on promises. The "1,000+ clinical studies" page is a sales funnel, not a scientific resource. The gap between what has been studied and what is being sold is enormous — and it's filled entirely with marketing.

The second kind is engineering-driven and medically positioned. These are the serious brands — the ones you've seen endorsed by physiotherapists, sports teams, and biohacking communities. Their devices are real. They deliver red and near-infrared light at the wavelengths they publish. Their hardware is designed by engineers who understand photobiomodulation, and many of them have genuine clinical advisors on staff. We respect these companies. Some of our own background is in this space.

What's different from us is their business model. They've chosen to position their devices as medical products. That means they can say that their specific device treats specific conditions — not just that red light in general has been studied, but that the thing you're holding in your hand will reduce your inflammation, boost your collagen, accelerate your recovery. Specific claims about specific outcomes from a specific product.

To make those claims legally, you need medical device certification. ISO 13485 quality management systems. IEC 60601 electrical safety testing. Clinical evaluations, notified body reviews, post-market surveillance. This costs hundreds of thousands of dollars before a single unit ships. It's an ongoing compliance infrastructure.

That cost gets passed to you.

And once a company has invested that much in earning the right to make claims, they have to make claims. The certification only has value if the marketing leans hard into therapeutic benefits. So the advisory board goes on the website. The studies get catalogued. The athlete endorsements come in. Everything reinforces the authority of the brand to tell you what the device will do for you.

This is not dishonesty. It's a structural incentive. These are good devices, built by people who care about the technology. But the model they've chosen means the brand must be the authority, the price must reflect the cost of maintaining that authority, and the customer must trust the claims enough to pay the premium. That's the deal.

We're the third kind. We build with the same engineering rigour as the serious medical brands — our founder designed one of the most respected wearable red light devices on the market before starting this company. But we chose a different model entirely.

What We Do Instead

We tell you exactly what our device is.

The Helder 2 emits red light peaking at 631 nanometers and near-infrared light peaking at 856 nanometers — with the vast majority of its optical power in the NIR spectrum. It draws up to 25 watts through a USB-C Power Delivery connection. It has a cylindrical lamp head, 60 millimeters in diameter, with internal airflow cooling to prevent hot spots and ensure even illumination. It has three modes — Body, Head, and Red-Off — each with its own guided timer. Body Mode runs for 20 minutes. Head Mode runs for 10 minutes, because your face and scalp need less exposure. The dosing logic is built into the device so you don't have to think about it.

That's what the product is. Those are engineering facts. You can measure them, verify them, and compare them against any other device on the market.

What we don't do is tell you what happens when you use it. Not because we don't have opinions. Not because we haven't seen things. But because we believe that's your discovery to make, not our claim to sell.

Citizen Science and the Wellness Revolution

Something important has been happening over the last decade, and it has nothing to do with red light.

People started taking their wellness into their own hands.

Wim Hof didn't wait for a respiratory specialist to approve cold water exposure before millions of people started taking ice baths. Nobody needed a clinical trial to figure out that mouth taping at night helped them sleep better — they learned it from each other. Breathwork protocols spread through communities and YouTube channels, not through hospitals and prescriptions. Meditation went from monastery to mainstream without a single pharmaceutical company's permission.

These aren't fringe behaviours anymore. They're part of a genuine shift in how people relate to their own health. And if you're honest with yourself, you know exactly when that shift accelerated. There were a few years, not long ago, when a lot of people discovered — some for the first time — that the authorities don't always agree, that expert consensus can change overnight, that institutions can be slow or conflicted or simply wrong, and that at the end of the day you are the one living in your body. Many people came out of that period with a quiet but permanent recalibration: the willingness to listen, to research, but ultimately to think for themselves.

That instinct is not anti-science. It's pro-sovereignty. And it's the foundation of everything we're building.

This is wellness, not medicine. And the distinction matters.

Medicine is for when something is wrong. Medicine requires diagnosis, prescription, professional oversight, clinical evidence, and regulation. We respect that entirely. If you're ill, see a doctor. Full stop.

But wellness is different. Wellness is the daily practice of supporting your body and mind through intentional habits and routines. It's what you do when nothing is "wrong" but you want to feel more right. And for that, you are the world's leading expert on yourself.

Red light fits naturally into this picture. Humans evolved under a full spectrum of sunlight that includes red and near-infrared wavelengths. Modern life has moved us indoors under artificial lighting, away from the light our bodies developed with over hundreds of thousands of years. A red light routine isn't some futuristic biohack. It's arguably one of the most ancient and intuitive practices there is — spending time in light that your skin and cells recognise.

We just made a very precise, portable, affordable tool for doing it consistently.

Why This Matters for You

So you have three choices as a buyer. A cheap device with big claims and questionable engineering. An expensive device with big claims and solid engineering. Or an affordable device with no claims and solid engineering.

The first option is a gamble. The second is a legitimate product — but you're paying for both the device and the cost of the claims infrastructure that allows the brand to tell you what it does. The third is us.

We publish our specs transparently. We price our devices as accessibly as we can. And we let the community generate the knowledge. Your experience is your data. Shared honestly, it becomes collective wisdom. And collective wisdom from real people using a tool in their real lives is, frankly, more relevant to you than a study conducted on rat cells in a Brazilian laboratory — no matter how many times a brand's website links to it.

We're not anti-science. We love the science. We've spent years deep in the research. But we think the most exciting science in this space is the kind that hasn't been done yet — the kind that happens when thousands of everyday people start paying attention to their own bodies and sharing what they notice.

That's citizen science. And it starts with you.

The Real Evidence

So if we claim no benefits, what evidence do we offer?

People.

Real people, using the Helder 2 in their daily routines, filming their experience, sharing their observations. Some are athletes. Some are office workers with stiff necks. Some are grandmothers. Some are wellness professionals who integrate it into their practice. Some are sceptics trying it for the first time.

None of them are paid to say nice things. None of them are reading from a script. None of them are incentivised to exaggerate. They're just doing their routine and telling you what it's like.

We think that's more valuable than a curated database of studies you'll never read about equipment you'll never use in conditions that don't match your life.

And here's what makes this approach honest in a way that clinical claims can never be: when someone shares their experience, they'll also share when something doesn't work, or doesn't feel like anything, or isn't what they expected. That's real. That's useful. You can't get that from a brand that has a financial interest in every interaction being a success story.

We welcome the full range of experiences because we trust the technology enough to let reality speak for itself.

What We Spent Our Money On Instead

We explained the medical device path above. We opted out of it — not because we couldn't pursue it, but because we didn't want the business model it creates. We didn't want to charge you for our paperwork.

Instead, we put our resources into what actually matters to you when you're holding the device in your hands. Better optical components. Precise wavelength control. Thoughtful thermal management. A USB-C Power Delivery connection that works with any modern charger, laptop, or power bank — no proprietary cables, no battery anxiety. A mechanical arm that positions the light on your face, shoulders, back, or legs while you lie in bed or sit on the sofa. Guided timers — 20 minutes for body, 10 minutes for face — because a good routine should have a beginning and an end, and the device should know the difference.

The result is a device that is engineered to a high standard and priced honestly. What we didn't spend on certification, we spent on the thing you actually hold.

Our Numbers, Your Conclusions

We said we claim no benefits. We didn't say we'd be vague.

Other brands bury their specs behind marketing language. They'll tell you their device uses "clinically proven wavelengths" and delivers "optimal power" — but try to find the actual numbers on their website and you'll scroll through paragraphs about NASA and mitochondria before you find anything measurable. That's by design. If you can't compare, you can't question.

We think you deserve better than that. So here's exactly what the Helder 2 does, expressed in numbers you can verify with a power meter if you want to.

We push up to 25 watts of electrical power into the device through a standard USB-C Power Delivery connection. Out of that, over 10 watts comes out the front as actual optical power — photons hitting your skin.

But here's what matters most: the distribution of that power. Of the 10.47 watts of total optical output, 9.24 watts — roughly 88 percent — is near-infrared at 856 nm. The remaining 1.23 watts is red light at 631 nm.

This is a deliberate engineering decision, not an afterthought. NIR penetrates deeper into tissue than visible red. It passes through skin, through fat, into muscle and bone. The red channel is visible — it's the warm glow you see during a session — but the real work, if there is work being done, is happening in the infrared spectrum that you can't see at all. Most competing devices split their power more evenly between red and NIR, or don't tell you the split at all. We chose to load the NIR heavily, because if you're going to sit in front of a light, you want the energy going where it goes deepest. That's also why Red-Off Mode exists — you can run pure NIR sessions with no visible light at all, in a dark room, before sleep, without disrupting anything.

For context on total output: the most popular wearable red light device on the market — the one endorsed by MLB trainers and tennis champions — publishes a total optical power output of 5.5 watts. Ours is nearly double that, at a fraction of the price. We're not saying that makes ours "better" in any therapeutic sense — remember, we claim nothing. We're just giving you the numbers.

The light comes out in a focused 30-degree beam angle. That's a deliberate design choice. A wider beam scatters light across a bigger area but dilutes the energy at any given point. Our tighter beam means more of those 9-10 watts are concentrated on the area you're actually pointing at. Less waste. More of what you're paying for, going where you aim it.

The wavelengths are 631 nanometers (red, visible) and 856 nanometers (near-infrared, invisible). Both sit within the most studied wavelength windows in the photobiomodulation literature. We didn't invent that. We just built a precise tool that delivers them efficiently — and weighted the output heavily toward the infrared, where the penetration depth is greatest.

Body Mode runs for 20 minutes. Head Mode runs for 10 minutes. The device knows which mode it's in and adjusts both the output and the timer accordingly. Your face and scalp are thinner, more sensitive tissue — they don't need the same duration as a shoulder or a lower back. We built that logic in so you don't have to think about it.

The lamp head is a 60mm diameter cylinder, housed in ABS/PC with internal airflow cooling to prevent hot spots. Even illumination across the treatment area means no part of your skin gets more energy than another.

And then there's the arm. We mounted the Helder 2 on a mechanical arm, and we'll be honest — it's not the sexiest piece of design. But it might be the most important decision we made. Because a red light device only works if you actually use it. Every day. And you're not going to do that if you have to hold it in position for twenty minutes, or prop it up on a stack of books, or stand in front of a wall panel when you'd rather be on the sofa.

The arm reaches everywhere. Face, neck, shoulders, back, legs, arms — all while you're lying in bed or sitting on the couch. You position it once, press the button, and go back to your book or your phone or your evening. It's made for life, not for a wellness photoshoot. That's a design philosophy: the best routine is the one you don't have to think about.

And it all runs on USB-C. Any PD charger. Any laptop. Any power bank. No proprietary cables, no wall adapters that only work in one country, no battery that degrades after a year of daily use.

Here it is in plain terms:

That's what the device is. Every number is measurable. None of them are claims about what happens to your body.

What you do with this information is up to you. If you know what joules per square centimetre means, you can calculate your own dosing. If you don't, just press the button, sit in the light, and see what you notice. Both approaches are welcome here.

We trust the technology enough to show you exactly what it does. We trust you enough to let you decide what it means.

Made in Thailand, Built to Scale

Let us be transparent about how this product gets made. Because if we're going to claim nothing about outcomes, we should be completely honest about everything else.

Helder 2 is designed and engineered by Arjen Helder in Thailand — including the PCB design, which he does himself. Assembly and manufacturing happen at the AriHelder factory in Chiang Mai, a facility we converted from a previous manufacturing operation that produced the neurovizr, a neurotechnology device co-founded by our partner Christian. The infrastructure, the workflows, the quality standards — they were already in place. We repurposed them for our own product. Every aspect of the manufacturing package is owned by us. There is no white-labelling. No mystery OEM factory making the same device for twelve different brands with different logos slapped on front.

We chose Thailand deliberately. Not just because we're here — though we are, and you're welcome to visit our showroom for a guided 10-minute first session — but because Southeast Asia deserves better access to wellness technology. The global red light market has been overwhelmingly concentrated in the US and Europe, with price points that exclude most of the world. A $500 device might be an impulse buy in California. In Chiang Mai or Jakarta or Manila, that's a different conversation entirely.

We're starting small and local on purpose. Small batch manufacturing. Local warranty and repair in Chiang Mai. A showroom you can walk into. A team you can talk to face-to-face. This is how we build trust — not through a database of studies, but through proximity and accountability.

And when this community grows — when enough real people are sharing their routines and discovering what daily red light practice means to them — we're ready to scale. We've partnered with Xiamen E-Calling Electronic Co. in China, owned by Peter, a long-time friend of the founders. It's a manufacturer with over 16 years of experience, a 10,000 square metre facility, and the capacity to produce over 1.5 million units annually. They already manufacture health care devices and PCBA modules, and they've been our scaling partner from the beginning.

This is the plan in plain sight: build the product with craft in Thailand, build the community with honesty, and when demand outgrows our local capacity, scale production through a proven Chinese manufacturing partner without compromising what made the product good in the first place. We own the design. We own the manufacturing package. The quality stays with us regardless of where units are assembled.

Most brands in this space did it backwards. They scaled manufacturing first, built massive inventory, then spent millions on marketing — Harvard name-drops, influencer sponsorships, clinical study databases — to create enough demand to justify all that production. We're doing it the other way around. Community first. Demand follows trust. Manufacturing follows demand.

We believe everyone deserves access to a well-made red light routine device. Not everyone needs the most expensive option on the market. And the price of a device has very little to do with the price of the components — it mostly reflects the cost of the marketing machine behind it.

We'd rather spend less on marketing and charge you less for the product. The community does the rest.

Join Us

This isn't a brand launch. It's an invitation.

We're building something different in the red light space — a community of curious people who believe that wellness tools should be accessible, honestly presented, and community-driven. People who are comfortable being their own experiment. People who share what they find — the good, the unremarkable, and everything in between — because honest information helps everyone.

Here's what we're asking:

If you already use red light in your routine — whether it's a panel, a wearable, a handheld, or a Helder — share your experience. Not as a testimonial. Not as an endorsement. Just as a person telling their story. What do you do? When do you do it? What have you noticed? What haven't you noticed? That's all valuable.

If you're curious but haven't tried it — come find us. If you're in Thailand, visit our showroom. Try a 10-minute session. See what you think. No sales pitch, no pressure. Just light and time.

If you're a wellness professional — a physiotherapist, massage therapist, yoga teacher, personal trainer, or anyone who works with bodies — talk to us. We'd love to hear how a simple, targeted red light tool might fit into what you already do.

If you think this approach is refreshing — share this post. Not for us. For the conversation it starts. The wellness industry needs more honesty and less hype. Every share chips away at the old model.

We claim no benefits. We built a precise tool. We trust you to explore it.

Your body. Your routine. Your discoveries.

AriHelder — Red Light Routine

The Helder 2 is a compact, portable wellness light device designed to support comfort, relaxation, and daily well-being through red (631 nm) and near-infrared (856 nm) illumination. It is not a medical product and makes no therapeutic claims. If you have a medical condition, consult a healthcare professional.

Visit us at arihelder.com | Try a guided session at our Thailand showroom