As part of personalised medicine emerging from the human genomics revolution, 
many websites now offer direct-to-consumer genetic testing. Here, we examine 
three personal genomics companies--Navigenics, deCODEme and 23andMe--each of 
which represents contrasting registers of 'personalisation'. We identify three 
distinctive registers in these websites: a paternalistic (medical) register; a 
translational (scientific) register and a democratic (consumerist) register. We 
explore in detail the rhetorical and discourse devices employed in these 
websites to assess how personalised healthcare is promised to the public. 
Promising information that will empower prevention of common complex diseases 
and ensure better quality of life is conflated with promising greater access to 
personal information. The presence and absence of scientific legitimacy is 
related to concerns about accuracy and validity on the one side, and fears of 
paternalism and elitism on the other. Nevertheless, a common strategy uniting 
these different styles of personalisation is consumer empowerment. Finally, we 
consider the tension between the drive of translational medicine to make human 
genomic research practically relevant, and the intrinsic uncertainties of 
scientific research and show how, in the commercial domain, future risks are 
transformed into discourses of promise by concealing these uncertainties.