Break the skin picking habit, gently

Serena is a habit tracker for skin picking. You log an urge as it happens — where it hit, what triggered it, whether you resisted — and Serena turns those entries into patterns, streaks and skin-healing trends you can actually act on.

Dermatillomania, also called excoriation or skin picking disorder, is a body-focused repetitive behaviour: picking at skin, spots or scabs to the point of damage, often without noticing you have started. It is common and treatable, and awareness of the urge is the usual first step.

No. Serena is a self-help tool for noticing and understanding your own habit, not a diagnostic tool or a medical device, and it does not give medical advice. If picking is damaging your skin or your life, speak to a dermatologist or a therapist trained in body-focused repetitive behaviours. Serena works well alongside that care.

Your urge logs, notes, check-ins and settings are kept in a local database on your device and are never uploaded to our servers. You can erase everything at any time from Settings, or by deleting the app.

A scan photo is sent securely to Google AI services for analysis, the result comes back to your device, and the photo is not stored afterwards. Aside from anonymous usage analytics, a scan is the only thing that ever leaves your phone, and only when you take one.

No. Serena never asks for your name or email address, and there is nothing to sign up for. Anonymous usage analytics (which features get used, where onboarding drops off, crashes) are collected on EU servers to improve the app, and you can ask us to exclude you entirely.

Logging urges, streaks, check-ins and your insights all work without a connection, because they run against the database on your device. Skin scans need a connection, since the analysis happens in the cloud.

Urge logging, streaks, milestones, check-ins and insights are free to use. Premium lifts the caps: unlimited urge logs and unlimited skin scans with full healing history. It is $24.99 a year, or $4.99 a week after a 3-day free trial, billed through the App Store.

Serena runs on iPhone and iPad, and is available on the App Store. An Android version is not available yet.

Serena sends gentle nudges to check in with your urges, timed against the patterns in your own logs rather than a fixed schedule. You can adjust or turn them off in Settings at any time.