Can your iPhone fix your acne? Dr. Greg Pearson would certainly like you to think so. He has devised an iPhone app that claims to both prevent pimples and reverse aging by bombarding the user’s face with red and blue light. Blue apparently kills bacteria and the red apparently acts as an anti-inflammatory so that users can “treat their acne while talking on the phone.”
Sound ridiculous? It probably is. For every iPhone app that actually serves a purpose (like your iPhone light saber, which is obviously vital to your day) there are a dozen apps that are so useless they boarder on fraud. Pearson isn’t the first app creator to make use of the phones ability to throw colored light on its user. “PocketPainDoctor” uses “atomic blue” or “atomic red” lights to alternately relieve aches and pains or keep you wide awake and at attention. Like the AcneApp, it costs two dollars and seems to do just about what you’d expect it to do. Nothing.
There are plenty of other offenders, including iNap@work, which supposedly creates typing, clicking and stapling noises to cover work time naps but sounds so contrived that it might as well be iGetFired@work. Or Teen Drug Use: 34 Warning Signs, which charges users four dollars to advise them that “grades dropping” and “possessing drug paraphernalia” are signs of teen drug use. Or CalmCandle, which charges the princely sum of four dollars and ninety-nine cents for a video of a candle burning. The grand prize goes to IAmRich, an app so ridiculous that Apple took it out of the App store. IAmRich did nothing except turn your home screen into a black field with a glowing image of a gem in the middle. It cost $999.99. Eight people bought it before it was taken down.
Of course, given how much time teens, and just about everyone else, spend on their iPhones, if AcneApp works, it could be the most useful iPhone App ever invented.
