For Media — Fact Sheet
Skin has quietly become the next health signal.
People are beginning to measure their skin the way they already measure sleep, training and recovery. Stella — an Australian app that scans skin and tracks how it changes week to week — is one of the first places that behaviour is visible at scale, which is what makes the figures below possible.
Things we didn't expect
- 01
One person is tracking 44 different skincare products at once.
- 02
People who wear a fitness tracker are more than twice as likely to still be tracking their skin a month later.
- 03
A single 30-second face scan records around 140 separate skin measurements.
The trend, up close
Skin as a recovery metric.
The clearest sign of the shift comes from people who already track their bodies. Stella connects to Oura, Apple Health, Garmin and Withings — and the people arriving from that world treat skin as a signal to follow, not a thing to buy their way out of.
Still tracking their skin at 30 days
Reach a third scan
Correlational, and partly self-selection — people who already track tend to keep tracking. Which is rather the point: skin has joined the quantified self.
Why this data is different
Nobody's selling you anything.
- Sells no products, and takes no affiliate or commission revenue.
- Never tells anyone what to buy.
- Doesn't soften or suppress an observation to suit a partner.
- Doesn't diagnose.
In a category built on selling the next product, an independent record of what's actually happening to skin is itself unusual — and worth noting.
By the numbers
1,000,000+individual skin measurements have already been recorded.
Around 140 measurements per 30-second scan, across 7,188 scans — 1,042,194 data points and counting.
- 7,188
- scans completed
- 78,082
- products mapped
- 17,099
- brands
- 1,483
- people, so far
Directional, not definitive — an early-stage dataset that grows every day.
Routine maximalism
44skincare products logged by a single user.
Most routines are smaller — around six products on average (median five) — but roughly one in three people log seven or more. People are genuinely running large, layered routines, and now there's a record of it.
From 510 users with logged routines; self-reported.
How it works
Stella standardises how each photo is captured, measures the same skin signals every time, and tracks how those signals change over weeks and months.
Clinical grounding
The skin-signal rubric was defined with consultant dermatologist Dr Alice Rudd (cofounder, FACD). Measurements are appearance-level — how skin looks over time — not diagnoses.
What Stella won't claim
- It won't diagnose, treat, or make clinical claims.
- It won't claim a product caused a change — only that signals moved, or didn't.
- It won't rank or compare individual brands.
- It won't promise an outcome or show a before-and-after.
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