Posted on: July 25, 2007
The Zap Factor
The story behind high-tech zit zapper Zeno
By Lisa Arnett
CTW Features
The pursuit of better skin – and the public's willingness to shell out their hard-earned cash in search of it – has made the acne treatment business a multibillion-dollar industry. Zeno, a $150 blemish-clearing device that debuted in dermatologist’s offices in 2005, has drawn widespread media attention and now is being sold over-the-counter in an increasing number of stores. For a society obsessed with poking and prodding its faces, nothing sounds more satisfying than eradicating blemishes with your own personal zit-zapping device. Naturally, we had some questions. Mainly, does it really work? And why is it so expensive?
Putting Zeno to the test
The slick-looking, handheld Zeno is about the size of a cell phone, with a metal tip that provides a pointed heat source to wipe out bacteria breeding beneath a pimple. I put the gadget to use on a swollen zit dwelling on my face’s worst problem spot: my chin. After three 2.5-minute treatments over 24 hours, it was noticeably on its way to healing. When pressing the Zeno to a not-yet-surfaced red spot between my eyebrows, it was hard not to feel a little bit like I was holding a gun to my head, but instead of emerging into a full-fledged pimple, it had retreated by the next morning.
When word got around that I was giving the Zeno a road test, everyone – my boyfriend, my parents, my brother – were in line to try it. I even found it mysteriously missing from its storage place on more than one occasion.
Word to the wise: Though the Zeno is designed to be shareable, if you invest in your own, keep it to yourself, or risk losing it forever!
How Zeno was born
What’s (almost) cooler than Zeno itself is the gadget’s inventor and how he created it. Contrary to popular belief, he’s not a dermatologist, and he’s not backed by a deep-pocketed corporation. Robert Conrad is just a self-proclaimed nerd who connected the dots between his day job as a genetic engineer and his continuing struggle with occasional acne.
“I have pimples; I always have had them,” says Conrad, COO of Houston-based Tyrell Inc., the company he founded after inventing Zeno. “I was getting past my 20s, and I was pretty much sick of having pimples. I wanted to figure out someway to get rid of them for myself. To be dead honest, I never thought about making a company.”
Working at a genetic engineering firm, Conrad and his colleagues were producing a heat-shock protein in one of their labs. They’d grow a bacterial colony over several weeks or months, then to kill it, they applied heat of a very specific temperature. As the bacteria died, it produced a protein Conrad would harvest for engineering use.
“It struck me, literally, while laying in bed one night ... why don’t we use this on the bacteria that I want to get rid of?” The enemy was clear: P. acnes, the bacteria responsible for 90 percent of pimples.
“I did work in the lab to find out exactly what time and temperature I needed to expose [the bacteria to] to get the death rate that I wanted,” he says.
Then Conrad set to work in his garage, building devices that created a concentrated heat source and testing them on his own face. The first working prototype was cumbersome: “You had to plug it in [and] it was very sketchy, but it worked quite well,” Conrad recalls. But after friends and family started borrowing and refusing to return the device, it occurred to him he had a marketable invention in the making.
How it works
Hormones, stress and poor hygiene are some of the various things that can trigger acne, but at the fundamental level, a pimple forms in the same way: Dead skin cells and oil build up in a pore, and P. acnes bacteria grows, creating an inflamed red spot.
“Your body has a natural reaction to infection: It’s called a fever. And we all get them, we all hate them, but it’s very effective,” Conrad says. “A fever takes couple days to get rid of that invasion. What Zeno does is give a very dosed, specific ‘fever’ to the bacteria causing the pimple, killing it and making the pimple go away.”
Zeno treats mild to moderate acne, and works best when used at the first sign of a pimple before it’s developed a whitehead, Conrad says. Once a whitehead has formed, Zeno can still be used to zap the burgeoning bacteria; however, the whitehead — the pore’s physical blockage — still needs to be extracted. Zeno does not work on blackheads, which are blocked pores without the presence of P. acnes bacteria.
“We’re not ‘cooking’ or sterilizing the area. We’re beating back the bacteria enough for your body to take over and win.” Conrad says. “[P. acnes] is a really important part of the skin flora. It lives on our skin to eat excess sebum, and is really important in the process of skin regeneration and skin health. So you don’t want to get rid of it; you want to get it back to a natural state where it’s in balance.”
‘Why didn’t I think of that?’
That’s one of the most common questions Conrad has heard since founding Tyrell Inc. and debuting the Zeno in 2005. The concept of reducing blemishes with heat isn’t a new one; it’s a common practice to apply a hot compress to a pimple to reduce its size or prepare for extraction during a facial.
Before inventing the Zeno, Conrad tried the hot compress method in an attempt to combat a monstrous zit that reared its head the night before an important business presentation.
“I turned the hot water as hot as it would go in my house, and took a rag and went back and forth between the hot water to my forehead for 10 minutes. And the next morning I woke up, and the pimple had reduced in size, but I had first-degree burned my skin all around it,” Conrad says, laughing. “So from that, I got a positive reaction: the pimple reduced. And I got a negative: I burned myself. How do I control these two?”
Maintaining a constant, specific temperature is the key concept behind Zeno, Conrad says. “[If it’s] too low, you actually encourage growth, you incubate the bacteria, basically. And [if it’s] too high, you burn.”
That’s precisely why the device comes with a high price tag: It’s essentially a mini-computer that senses the temperature of your skin, heats up accordingly, and times each treatment down to the second. Because repeatedly generating such high heat gradually wears out the Zeno’s internal resistors over time, it has a replaceable tip equipped with a quality-control computer chip that shuts off the device when you’re ready for replacement. That way, you don’t try to the Zeno “one more time,” just like you would a dull razor, Conrad says, and risk treating yourself ineffectively.
Proving it works
In a double-blind clinical trial (meaning neither the doctors nor patients knew whether they were using a functioning Zeno or a decoy device) more than 90 percent of participants saw their blemishes improve or disappear in less than 48 hours. The FDA reviewed the study and approved it for sale in both medical offices and over-the-counter in stores.
When Zeno debuted in 2005, it was available only through the medical offices of dermatologists and plastic surgeons.
“What we wanted to do is to make sure that people understood this is real science, that this is truly a medical device,” Conrad says. “We had the option to launch right away into retail, but we wanted to make sure the doctors understood and believed in the science.”
The Skin & Body Institute in Las Vegas has carried the Zeno since it became available to medical offices. [Resident dermatologist] Sean Su, M.D., recommends it to all of his patients who have mild to moderate acne, says manager Keith Nguyen.
“It’s been really successful,” Nguyen says. “Our patients get really excited about it and are satisfied with the treatments.”
Not all dermatologists sell, use or have even heard of Zeno.
“It does not make the dermatology press much, and was not mentioned at an [industry] meeting I recently attended, which focused a great deal on acne,” says Matt Shaffer, M.D., of the Heartland Dermatology and Skin Cancer Center in Salina, Kan., who has no experience with the Zeno. “For these reasons, I do not think it is going to be considered a first-line or even second-line therapy for acne,” Shaffer says.
The Zeno is not intended to treat severe acne, Conrad says, and people who do have it need to be put on an appropriate regimen by a dermatologist.
Starting in fall of 2006, Zeno went public, so to speak, launching a retail version (good for 60 treatments; $150) in stores such as Walgreen’s and Target; a pro version (90 treatments; $189) in spa-focused stores such as Sephora, Bliss and Ulta; and a Zeno MD (150 treatments, $200) available through medical practitioners. Replacement tips run $25 to $55, depending on the model you’re using.
