How to Read an Aesthetics Ad

I publish this site and I take out an advertisement on it, so treat this page with the suspicion it deserves. The disclosure is on every page and on the About page for exactly that reason.

What follows is not a claim that aesthetic marketing lies. It mostly does not. It makes true statements about things adjacent to what you are being sold, and learning to see the join is the single most useful skill for anyone spending money in this field.

Move one: borrowing the clinic's evidence

A consumer device cites studies run on a machine with a hundred times its power output. A cream cites a study where the ingredient was injected. A supplement cites a mechanism observed in cell culture.

Every citation is real. None of them was performed on the product in your hand.

The test: does the cited study use this product, at this dose, in this delivery, in human faces? If a company has that study, it leads with it.

Move two: the surgical word for a non-surgical thing

"Liquid facelift" is the clearest example. What it describes is eight to fifteen syringes of filler placed across a face. Filler is a volume tool; it pushes tissue forward and it does not lift it. Using a surgical word for a syringe-based treatment borrows the expectation of an operation for something that does something fundamentally different.

The harm is not the disappointment. It is the sequence: several years and a great deal of money chasing a lift that never arrives, a face that slowly migrates and looks puffy, and then a real operation that has to begin by dissolving the product and waiting for the tissue to settle.

The same move powers "non-surgical facelift", "thread lift" as a substitute for a lift, and "instant facelift" for anything at all. A useful reflex: when you see the word facelift attached to something that is not surgery, ask what happens to the retaining ligaments. The answer is nothing.

Move three: proprietary numbers

Ads increasingly carry a figure with no unit and no reference — a treatment "level", an ingredient "complex" number, a protocol tier. They exist because a number implies measurement.

The question is what the number is a number of. If the ad cannot say, it is branding wearing a lab coat.

Move four: the before-and-after that changed two things

Lighting, angle, expression and makeup account for more apparent change than most treatments produce. A pair of photographs is only evidence if the lighting, the camera position, the head position and the facial expression match, and if the "after" is at a stated interval.

I hold my own field to this. It is why photographs on my practice site are taken in a fixed setup at a stated interval, and why there are no patient photographs on this domain at all.

Move five: the celebrity treatment

Someone visible has a treatment, posts it, and the treatment is everywhere for a season.

Two things are worth separating. That a public figure had something done is a fact, when they have said so, and reporting it with attribution is ordinary journalism. What follows it usually is not: the implication that their face is the result of that one treatment. Almost nobody's is. Faces that look expensively maintained are usually maintained by several things over years, plus lighting, plus the fact that the person is often young.

I never assert what a named living person has had done. Where this site covers a celebrity treatment, it reports what a reputable outlet reported, attributed and linked, and a script enforces the rule so that nobody has to remember it.

Move six: the free thing that is not free

"Free consultation" is a standing phrase in aesthetic advertising, and it is banned on both of my sites. A consultation is a physician's assessment; pricing it at zero prices the assessment at zero, and it changes what the appointment is for. When the visit is free, the visit exists to sell. Mine is charged, and the entire value of it is the sorting: which of your concerns is descent, which is deflation, which is skin, and which is anatomy that has always been there.

What good marketing in this field looks like

It names the mechanism. It names who it is not for. It gives a recovery timeline in days rather than adjectives. It distinguishes what the treatment does from what the patient hopes it does. And it survives the question that ends most sales conversations in this field:

What, specifically, will this not fix?