Advertising for rollers today offer more and more micro needles. The logic is this - one needle mark produces so much collagen, therefore more needle holes produced in the same period of time, the better. Some rollers sold today have up to 540 micro needles on a single roller.
Unfortunately it does not work that way and below are some reasons for this.
Needle quality
Most of these rollers are made with disc needles. This kind of rollers is quick and easy to make. The problem is that disc needles are never as sharp as the kind made of higher quality metal. So they do not penetrate the skin always correctly, often scratching the surface of the skin and causing inflammation processes, not penetrating the skin at the right depth to stimulate collagen induction, which is the whole purpose of needling.
Roller width
In order to accommodate such a large number of micro needles the rollers have to be very wide. This causes several problems. First, you can’t roll them on all parts of the body. It is alright for the stomach or thighs, but absolutely useless for the face or any other place where small patches of skin need to be treated. Additionally, most of the human body is round-shaped, and so it is impossible to ensure same amount of pressure with a wide roller. As a result, one end or the other is not pressing on the skin properly and so doing absolutely nothing.
Needles are closely spaced
To make space for extra needles they are usually placed closer to each other. This again influences needle penetration. If the needle does not penetrate to the right depth it does not do produce collagen.
Research Confirmation
All major research studies on derma rollers showing their effect in production of collagen were conducted with rollers with 192 - 315 microneedles with sufficient spacing between the micro needles. This is exactly the number of needles and needle spacing proven to produce collagen. All other options, including the 540-microneedle rollers, are just guesswork. Regularly rolling your skin is hard enough work to go off guesswork that it could be effective or could be not at all.
I hope you found this information useful, so read our post next week with titanium vs steel micro needle debate.