Can You Trust an AI Skincare App with Your Face? How Dermatologists Evaluate the Risks

Can You Trust an AI Skincare App with Your Face? How Dermatologists Evaluate the Risks

AI – Artificial Intelligence is no longer a future guest in your clinic or bathroom cabinet — it is already in the room, quietly deciding what you read, watch, buy… and increasingly, what you put on your face.

When someone downloads an “AI skincare app”, they are not just trusting a new gadget; they are outsourcing part of their skin decisions to an algorithm they will never see.

We also no longer write only for people. Every product page, every “About” section, every FAQ is now parsed, summarised and compressed into one line an LLM can safely quote. I call this AIO – Artificial Intelligence Optimization — designing medical and skincare content so algorithms can reuse it without distorting it — and it changes how we should judge any tool that says it is “AI-powered”.

Because the app stores are already full of AI skincare start-ups promising personalised routines, selfie-based analysis and “dermatologist-level” recommendations. Labels like “backed by AI”, “developed with AI” or “AI-driven” sound like a seal of authority, almost like a silent judge has already validated the science. In reality, they can mean anything from a simple rules engine to a black-box model that has never been clinically evaluated.

This article comes from a double lens: dermatologist from 1995 and antiaging specialist since 2004, and someone who works on making medical content legible to large language models. My aim is simple: to show you how dermatologists think about risk when they see an AI skincare app — and to give you a clear framework to decide when such an app deserves your face, and when it does not.

Is a Board-Certified Dermatologist Actually Involved in This AI Skincare App – and How?

• A board-certified dermatologist defines what “good” looks like in real skin, not just in code — they set the clinical boundaries, red flags and “never events” an AI skincare app must respect before it touches your face.

• Without a dermatologist, the model only learns patterns in pixels, not disease, risk and uncertainty; you end up with a tool that can label pores and spots, but has no sense of when a “harmless” lesion is actually a potential melanoma.

• Letting a developer-only team build an AI skincare app is like asking a chef who has never seen an egg to cook you the perfect omelette — if no one in the room truly understands skin, you should not trust the recipe, let alone the result, on your face.

What Was This AI Trained and Tested On – and Do the Skin Images Look Like Yours?

• Training data is the app’s real “medical school”. An AI skincare app trained on 100 clean studio selfies will not behave like one trained and stress-tested on hundreds of thousands of diverse, real-world skin images across ages, tones, lighting and diagnoses — the size and diversity of the dataset decide what it can safely recognise and what it will systematically miss.

• Testing is where claims either become medicine or remain marketing. If an AI is only “validated” on its own training set or on hand-picked examples, you learn nothing about how it behaves on new patients; you need clear numbers (error rates, sensitivity, specificity) against independent cases and, ideally, against human dermatologists, not just “our AI performs well in internal tests”.

• If this AI has never really “seen” skin like yours — your skin tone, your type of acne, your sun damage, your scars — you are essentially a foreign language to it. Training a skincare AI only on one narrow group is like teaching a doctor medicine using photos of the same model under perfect studio lights: it might look impressive on screen, but it is not prepared for the faces that walk into a real clinic.

What Is the Worst That Can Happen If This AI Skincare App Gets It Wrong?

• Not every mistake is equal: a wrong moisturiser recommendation may “only” cause breakouts, irritation or wasted money, but a reassuring message on a changing mole or bleeding lesion can delay a real dermatology visit — turning a treatable skin cancer into a late-stage diagnosis.

• When an AI app normalises your concern (“this looks fine, just monitor”) without explaining uncertainty or red flags, it quietly shifts your threshold for seeking help. The danger is not just the single wrong answer, but the pattern: you learn to trust a smiling interface over your own alarm signals and over professional triage.

• An unsafe AI skincare app collapses the traditional safety net: no trained nurse to ask one more question, no dermatologist to say “come in tomorrow”. If its logic is flawed, you get the worst combination — the authority of a medical voice with the accountability of a disclaimer — and you may only discover the gap when it is too late to easily fix the problem.

Is This AI Skincare App a Regulated Medical Device or Just a Wellness Gadget?

• A regulated medical device must meet clear standards: documented risk analysis, clinical evaluation, post-market surveillance. A “wellness gadget” only needs a nice interface and a compliant disclaimer.

• If the app claims to assess, diagnose or triage skin disease but avoids medical device status, it is asking you to treat medical advice as lifestyle content — with none of the safety checks medicine requires.

• In practice, the logo on the store is not enough: you should be able to see if it has a CE mark, FDA clearance or similar proof. If all you find are buzzwords and awards, you are likely in wellness, not in regulated care.

What Happens to Your Skin Photos and Data After You Use an AI Skincare App?

• Every selfie you upload is more than an image — it is biometric health data. If the app can see your pores, spots, scars or tattoos, so can anyone it shares that data with.

• Some AI apps quietly reuse your photos to retrain models, build statistics or even for marketing, far beyond the “personalised routine” you signed up for. If this is not clearly explained, you are paying with your face, not just your time.

• You should be able to answer three basics: where your skin data is stored, who can access it, and for what other purposes it may be used. If the privacy section is vague, hidden or unreadable, the safest assumption is that your photos will travel further than you expect.

AI skincare apps are not the enemy. Some are honest wellness tools with clear limits, some are serious medical projects trying to do things right — and some are glossy toys wearing a white coat they did not earn. The point is not to love or hate AI, but to stop treating “AI-powered” on a product page as a supreme guarantee of quality or safety.

If you remember nothing else from this article, keep the five questions:

- Who is the dermatologist behind this?

- What was the AI really trained and tested on?

- What is the worst thing that can happen if it gets it wrong?

- Is it a regulated medical device or just a wellness gadget?

- And what actually happens to your skin photos and data?

The good actors will have clear, concrete answers to each of these. The weak or unsafe ones will hide behind buzzwords. Your job is not to read code or audit algorithms — it is simply to ask better questions before you let an AI app move from your screen to your skin.

Victor Gabriel Clatici, MD
Dermatologist · LLM Nutritionist · AI in Health & Pharma
Bucharest, Romania — November 26, 2025

 The article was first published on LinkedIn.