What the industry will not tell you before you book
In most of the United Kingdom, a person with no healthcare qualification may lawfully inject dermal filler into an adult. There is no licensing scheme in force. This publication is written for the person considering treatment, not the businesses selling it, and it publishes the checks you can make yourself.
Start here
Six pages that do most of the work. Together they take about half an hour and they are the closest thing to a protection that currently exists in this sector.
How to check the person injecting you is on a public register
Four regulators publish free, searchable registers. Here is how to use them, what each entry proves, and what to do when nobody can find the person at all.
What a consultation must cover before a cosmetic procedure
A consultation is not a sales appointment with a medical name on it. Here is the information that has to be given to you, who has to give it, and what its absence means.
The questions that make a bad provider uncomfortable
Twelve questions, what a good answer sounds like, and why the reaction to the question is more useful than the answer itself.
Why we do not rank clinics, and what we publish instead
Every list of best clinics in Britain was assembled by someone who did not visit them. We publish the verification method instead, and we explain why that is the more useful object.
What the law actually requires of the person injecting you
Less than almost everyone assumes. This is the single most important thing to understand before considering a non surgical cosmetic procedure in the UK.
What to do when a cosmetic treatment goes wrong
The first 48 hours determine both the clinical outcome and, later, whether anything can be proved. Here is the order to do things in.
Before you agree to anything
Every article on this site carries one of these. It is the part to screenshot and take with you, because people read this while anxious and in a hurry.
The sections
Six of them. Five are written for patients. One, clearly marked, is written for the industry, because the problems patients meet are produced by decisions made on the business side.
Checks before you agree
The verification you can do yourself, in public, for nothing, before anyone touches you.
Open the section4 articlesMedicines and prescribing
What a prescription-only medicine is, who may prescribe one, and why the prescriber should have met you.
Open the section6 articlesThe law and the regulators
What the law requires, what it does not, and which parts of it are in force in which UK nation.
Open the section6 articlesWhen it goes wrong
Complications, correction, liability, complaints and the routes to redress that actually exist.
Open the section6 articlesThe sell
Advertising rules, finance, pressure, and claims that run far ahead of the evidence behind them.
Open the section3 articlesFor the industry
A small trade-facing section for clinic owners and staff. Everything else on this site is written for patients.
Open the sectionWe do not rank clinics, and we will not sell one
There is no best clinics list on this site and there never will be. A ranking implies that we have assessed clinical outcomes, complication management and consent practice across those businesses. We have not, and neither has almost anyone else publishing such a list.
What we sell instead is a paid clinic listing built only from disclosed facts a reader can verify independently: registration numbers, premises regulation, the prescriber arrangement, the written complications policy and the indemnity arrangement. Alphabetical, labelled as paid, no score, no badge, no commentary. What we refuse to sell at any price is published on the clinic listings page, and the reasoning is in why we do not rank clinics.
When the rules change, we will tell you
One email when a law or a regulator's guidance changes in a way that alters what you should check, and when a new article is published. No treatment offers, no product recommendations and no clinic suggestions, because we do not make any.