11 Best Microneedling Pens: Your Ultimate Buying Guide

Microneedling is not, as you might reasonably think, a term for a tiny mouse doing needlepoint (too bad!). Instead, it’s something that sounds scary but is actually amazing. Let’s call it…lots of tiny needles poking you in the face but make it fashion. Or in other words, it’s a weird thing that makes your skin gorgeous. Once it was an in-office only treatment for the rich and famous, but now you can buy beginner-friendly devices for at-home use, called dermarollers, or, more relevantly, the higher-tech dermapens or microneedling pens.

Thanks to its booming popularity and the big business that is the at-home beauty tool trend, you can now purchase an effective and safe microneedling pen to use in your home. Do you remember when Kim Kardashian made waves with her “Vampire Facial?” Yep! That treatment included a version of microneedling.

A microneedling pen has a removable cartridge with lots of very thin, very short needles that quickly poke in and out of the very shallow layers of your skin when the device is switched on. There’s a lot going on here, but the short version is that the needles create tiny wounds on your face. Then, your super smart body goes into skin-healing mode to heal the tiny wounds. This boosts many of your body’s natural beautifying processes, including collagen production, giving you a near-instant glow. Microneedling has also been shown to help with scarring, wrinkles, loose skin, dull skin, and countless other skin concerns.

So real talk: any beauty treatment where you pierce the skin and draw a bit of blood is not for the faint of heart or the nonchalant. You’ve only got the one face, after all. It’s very important to treat microneedling seriously, sanitize your hands, tools, and work area, and respect the process! That said, many experts agree microneedling is reasonably safe to do at home with the right tools, that is, and that’s where we come in!

We’re skipping over the low-tech manual dermarollers for now and getting straight to the more automated, turn-on-and-go microneedling pens that you can use at home to get great skin. Scroll down after our recommendations for more how’s, why’s and what-the-heck’s of the microneedling process. And for now, here’s our carefully researched list of the best overall microneedling pens to buy in 2021!