I have a long-running irritation with skin-tracking apps. Most of them score your face, gamify your routine, and then funnel you toward affiliate links. MySkinSelfie does none of that. It was built by Newcastle Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust with Newcastle University to give dermatology patients a way to track lesions, rashes, and post-treatment changes between clinic visits. Then they shipped it for free to everyone else. That is a strange and good story.
What MySkinSelfie is and isn’t
It is a photo diary with an onion-skin overlay so each shot lines up with the previous one, organized by date, condition, and body location, and stored on encrypted cloud servers rather than on your phone’s camera roll. You can generate a code to share a specific image set with a clinician. The Bristol and Newcastle NHS dermatology services use it inside their actual patient workflow.
It is not a beauty-tracking dashboard. There is no AI verdict, no skin score, no product recommendation engine, no community feed, no streaks. If you want a coach that nags you, look elsewhere. If you want the same camera setup every time so you can compare your forehead this month against your forehead in February, this is the cleanest tool I have used.
Who it’s for
Anyone running a slow trial of an active ingredient and trying to tell if it’s working. Anyone with a derm follow-up in eight weeks who wants to show, not tell. People watching a mole or patch they have been asked to monitor. People with melasma, rosacea, or post-inflammatory pigmentation who need months of context to make a routine decision. If your routine moves on a four-week cadence rather than a weekly one, this is the app.
The features that matter
The onion-skin overlay is the one I would have paid for. You point the camera, a translucent ghost of your last photo appears on screen, you line up forehead, ear, and chin, and you press the shutter. The two images become comparable. Lighting can still drift, but composition stops being the variable. After a month I had a forehead sequence with twenty-three shots, all framed identically, taken at random times of day, and the pattern in my chin-area pigmentation became obvious in a way my memory had genuinely lost.
Encrypted off-device storage matters more than people think. Skin photos belong on a server with a clinical data policy, not in the same camera roll your friends scroll through when you hand them your phone to show a holiday picture. The clinic-code sharing is the cleanest version of a feature most apps fudge. You generate a short code, your clinician punches it in on their end, and only the relevant images move. No DICOM export, no permanent link.
The contrarian take
The interface is plain. Buttons feel slightly older than the App Store average. The onboarding does not seduce you. I think that is correct. A skincare diary that feels addictive is a skincare diary you will compulsively edit, photograph too often, and use to anxiety-spiral about week-to-week noise that does not matter. MySkinSelfie’s lack of polish is doing real protective work. Skincare progress is monthly, not daily, and a quiet app respects that.
Real-world test
I tracked my left cheek for forty-three days through a routine reset using Microbiome Glow Serum in the morning and a barrier-focused PM stack. I shot at the same window twice a week, between 9:14 and 9:38 a.m., with the curtains half-drawn. Visible redness across the cheekbone went from a steady background hum at week one to spotty and patch-only by week six. I would not have noticed without the overlay, because the change was slow enough that day-to-day memory smoothed it into invisible. The app’s strength is exactly this: catching changes too gradual for your eyes to register in real time.
How it stacks against TroveSkin
TroveSkin is the popular alternative and the most direct counterpart in App Store search results. TroveSkin gives you a skin score, gamified streaks, AI-generated routine suggestions, and a social layer. If your goal is motivation and a dopamine hit, TroveSkin wins. If your goal is data you can hand to a dermatologist without it being mixed in with promotional banner ads, MySkinSelfie wins. TroveSkin has more features. MySkinSelfie has more credibility. Pick on the basis of what you are actually trying to track, not on feature count.
Frequently asked questions
Is MySkinSelfie really free? Yes. No in-app purchases, no premium tier. Funded as an NHS and Newcastle University project.
Does my dermatologist need to use the app too? No. They only need the share code, which opens in a browser. If they are at the Bristol or Newcastle NHS dermatology services they may already be using the clinician side.
What happens to my photos if I delete the app? The app’s published privacy policy treats images as the patient’s data, with deletion on request. Read the current policy before signing up; data policies can change.
Will it work for body skin and not just face? Yes. You can tag by body location, which is part of the original dermatology use case.
Is the overlay strong enough to catch small changes? Stronger than expected, in my testing. The limit is your own lighting consistency, not the alignment.
If you want more on how to read your own face honestly across months, the Elelaf skin science hub is the better entry point than any in-app scoring system. For the slow-skincare context I keep returning to in these reviews, the skinimalism manifesto covers the editorial position. And if you are starting a tracking habit because of a new active ingredient, how to introduce retinol without the peeling cycle pairs naturally with the kind of monthly photo data this app produces.
Sources
Newcastle Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, MySkinSelfie service page. British Journal of Dermatology, patient-led teledermatology photography studies (Aldridge et al., 2013 series).