There are six products under the VI Peel name: five for the face and one for the body. Clinics often present them as a ladder of strength. The published ingredient lists do not support that reading.
Here is what the manufacturer's own collection flyer states for each one.
VI Peel (Original) — TCA, phenol, retinoic acid, salicylic acid, vitamin C. Marketed for first-time peel patients, sensitive skin, early signs of aging from about age 20, rough texture, and maintenance.
VI Peel Advanced — TCA, phenol, retinoic acid, salicylic acid, vitamin C. Marketed for aging skin from about age 40, wrinkles, fine lines and loss of elasticity.
VI Peel Precision Plus — the same base, plus hydroquinone and kojic acid. Marketed for sun-induced pigmentation, sun damage, melasma and post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation.
VI Peel Purify — the same base, plus benzoyl peroxide, kojic acid and hydrocortisone. Marketed for active acne, breakout-prone skin, oily and congested skin, and teen acne.
VI Peel Purify with Precision Plus — the same base, plus benzoyl peroxide, hydroquinone, kojic acid and hydrocortisone. Marketed for excessive oil, acne with hyperpigmentation, acne scarring, hormonal acne and adult acne.
VI Peel Body — a genuinely different formula: glycolic acid, lactic acid, mandelic acid, TCA, phenol, allantoin and aloe vera.
One thing worth noticing straight away. Original and Advanced have identical published ingredient lists. They are separated by the age group and concern they are marketed to, not by anything the company has disclosed about what is in the bottle. If a clinic tells you Advanced is stronger, that is a claim with no published information behind it. It may be true. You cannot verify it, and neither can your provider unless the company has told them something it has not told anyone else.
The base does the peeling. TCA is a workhorse peeling acid, salicylic acid is oil-soluble and gets into pores, retinoic acid drives skin turnover, phenol is a strong keratolytic, and vitamin C is included as an antioxidant.
The add-ons are where this variant earns its name.
Benzoyl peroxide is an antibacterial acne ingredient, one of the few with a strong recommendation in the American Academy of Dermatology's 2024 acne guideline.
Hydrocortisone is a mild steroid, included to calm irritation.
Hydroquinone blocks the enzyme that makes pigment. It is the standard prescription-strength ingredient for melasma and dark marks.
Kojic acid works on pigment too, by a similar route, and is a common companion to hydroquinone.
So the logic of the product is straightforward: treat the breakout and the dark mark it leaves behind in the same appointment. That logic is sensible. It has not been tested against doing either one alone.
It differs from Purify only by the addition of hydroquinone. Purify already contains kojic acid, so the pigment side of Purify with Precision Plus is really the hydroquinone.
It differs from Precision Plus by the addition of benzoyl peroxide and hydrocortisone. Those are the acne and anti-irritation components.
It does not differ from either in the peeling acids themselves — as far as anyone outside the company can tell. The TCA, phenol, salicylic acid and retinoic acid are listed the same way in all three. Whether they are present at the same strengths is not published.
Which one to ask for is therefore a question about your skin, not about strength. If you have active breakouts and no meaningful discoloration, plain Purify covers it. If you have discoloration and your acne is under control, plain Precision Plus covers it. Purify with Precision Plus is for the person who has both problems at once.
Peel depth is not set by the acid alone. It is set by which acid, at what concentration, in how many coats, on skin that was prepared in a particular way — and by how thick your skin is and how hard the solution is pressed in. The same bottle can produce a light peel in one pair of hands and a deeper one in another. In published practice, depth is judged during the procedure by how the skin frosts, not by reading the label.
Because VI does not publish concentrations, an independent depth classification is impossible. Any page that assigns this peel a specific depth is stating something the manufacturer has not disclosed.
There is one more curiosity worth flagging. Phenol is the classic ingredient of deep peels, the kind that historically required cardiac monitoring. It appears in every VI Peel variant, in a product presented as a low-downtime treatment. The amount is clearly small, since nothing in the protocol involves monitoring. But the amount is not published, so that is an inference, not a fact.
One paper exists on any VI Peel, published in the Journal of Drugs in Dermatology in 2024. It was single-arm and open-label with 30 participants across Fitzpatrick skin types I to VI. There was no control group, no comparison peel, no randomization and no blinding — and the paper's conflict-of-interest statement is not publicly retrievable, while the manufacturer distributes the paper itself as marketing material. Read it as company-adjacent evidence.
Patients received a VI Peel and botulinum toxin on the same day, and the study's stated purpose was to check whether that combination was safe — not to measure what the peel does. No adverse events occurred. Scores improved: wrinkle severity by 60%, uniformity of pigment by 59%, skin tone by 70%.
Read those numbers carefully. The wrinkle figure is confounded by the injections, which reduce wrinkles by themselves. The pigment and tone figures are not directly attributable to the toxin, but they come from an uncontrolled study of 30 people with no comparison group, and the abstract does not state when after treatment the assessment happened.
Nothing has been published on Purify with Precision Plus specifically. The two other best-known branded peels sold in the US, Perfect Derma Peel and BioRePeel, have no indexed peer-reviewed studies at all. This is normal for the category rather than unusual for this brand.
The manufacturer states that all VI Peel treatments are safe and effective for all skin tones. No published trial supports that for this product. The 30-person study included the full range of skin types but was not designed or sized to measure pigment safety.
The published guidance for Fitzpatrick types IV to VI is more careful: superficial peels are widely used and well liked, medium-depth peels "require caution," and deep peels should be avoided. A 2026 scoping review of chemical peels in skin of color found only seven studies meeting inclusion criteria across the whole literature. That is the entire evidence base.
The manufacturer's own aftercare quietly acknowledges the issue: it extends the no-exercise window from 72 to 96 hours out to seven days for people "prone to hyperpigmentation."
If you have deeper skin, the useful conversation with your provider is about priming your skin beforehand and about what happens if a dark mark appears afterward, not about whether the product is universally safe.