NeoGen vs Tixel: Full-Field Coverage Against a Faster Week

We offer NeoGen and we don’t offer Tixel. Read the rest with that in mind.

What NeoGen does

NeoGen passes radiofrequency through nitrogen gas to make plasma, then delivers that as controlled thermal pulses to the skin surface. The skin itself absorbs the energy, with no colour target involved. Nothing enters the skin and the treated surface isn’t vaporised: it dries out, stays in place as a natural dressing while new skin forms underneath, then flakes away.

Two things follow, and they’re why NeoGen is on our menu.

It treats the whole field. No untreated skin between treated points, and the dried protective layer covers the entire area instead of a scatter of dots. Skin that’s evenly lined or sun-damaged responds to that better than to a pattern.

It reaches the lash line. Nothing enters the skin and the energy needs no pigment to land, so your clinician can work closer to the eye than with any needling or light-based device we own. Nothing else on our menu goes there, which is why the eye area is what we lead on with it.

What Tixel does

Tixel is thermomechanical. A tip of small heated pyramids makes brief direct contact with the skin, transferring heat by touch. It’s fractional, so it treats a pattern of points and leaves untreated skin in between.

That untreated skin is the point of the design. Healing spreads from it, which is what makes the recovery quicker. Full coverage and fast recovery pull against each other, and each device has picked a side.

The recovery each one asks for

Tixel is marketed on speed and its trial partly supports that. Roughly 80% of patients were back at work and at social activities two days after treatment.

The same paper is quoted less on what else it found. Crusting lasting beyond 48 hours was reported by 52% of Tixel patients, against 16% in the laser comparison arm. Most people function normally within two days, and half of them are still visibly crusted while they do it.

NeoGen’s published recovery is longer and better documented. The low-energy study recorded re-epithelialisation complete at four days and redness lasting six days on average, with a first session taking nine days to settle against four or five for the sessions after it. At the higher settings used in the acne scarring study, skin bronzed and then peeled over four to six days. Our day-by-day recovery guide covers each stage.

Tixel gets you back to work sooner. NeoGen covers every millimetre it passes over and reaches the lash line. Neither belongs in the week of an event.

The trials, side by side

Both devices have a randomised trial on periorbital wrinkles, and they aren’t the same size of evidence.

NeoGen’s is a randomised controlled evaluator-blinded trial of eighteen people, published in 2019. One side of the face received three sessions three weeks apart and the other side was left untreated. The treated side scored better on wrinkle grading, on instrument measurement of skin wrinkling, and on melanin index. Patients were followed to fourteen weeks. The device manufacturer was among the study’s funders.

Tixel’s is a randomised controlled trial of sixty-eight patients, published in 2022 and run across two centres in Israel and the United States, covering Fitzpatrick skin types I to VI. Patients received three to five treatments and were assessed six months after the last one by three physicians with no involvement in the treatment. Improvement in wrinkle classification averaged 1.6 points. The comparison arm was an active treatment, a non-ablative fractional 1565nm laser, which performed equivalently.

The gap shows in four places.

• Size. Sixty-eight against eighteen.
• Skin types. Tixel’s trial covered types I to VI. Energist’s protocols stop at IV, and types V and VI appear nowhere in them.
• Follow-up. Six months after the last treatment, against fourteen weeks.
• Comparator. Tixel was measured against a working laser. NeoGen was measured against an untreated cheek, which tells you the treatment does something without telling you how it stands against the alternatives.

Both trials found a real effect. Tixel’s was tested at greater scale and over a longer follow-up, and if trial weight is what you’re choosing on, that’s the one to know about. What it doesn’t test is the thing we bought NeoGen for, which is treating the full field right up to the lash line, since a fractional device by design does neither.

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