Posted January 29, 2009
You may have heard of the Clarisonic skin-care brush, which has racked up raves from tons of women’s magazines and scored a 2008 “Best of Sephora” designation from the national beauty chain. Great product, but it’s $195. Venerable gadget retailer Brookstone, sensing opportunity, recently started selling a cheaper competitor, the SonicDermabrasion Facial Brush. Like the Clarisonic, the Brookstone brush (made by a company called Pretika) looks a little iffy at first, because you automatically assume the brush head spins, like some sort of bathtub-scrubbing device, which would be scary and harsh. But the bristles don’t spin, they just gently pulsate in place hundreds of times per second—using the same high-frequency technology behind the sonic toothbrushes we here at Best Bets Daily are so fond of—to, basically, vibrate the dirt off of your skin and out of your pores. We’ve tested them both, and they’re eerily similar in design and function; both come with a charging stand/cradle, and both make your skin feel gently cleansed and exfoliated (low-cost, noncomedogenic drugstore cleansers like Cetaphil work best with these devices), like you just got a mini-facial. (By the way, Pretika recently upgraded its recharging technology; earlier versions of this brush apparently ran out of juice pretty quickly, but we didn’t find that to be a problem.) The main difference: Brookstone’s brush is a quarter of the cost.
$49.95 at Brookstone.com.