How to pick a great practitioner

It’s the question that Georgia and I get asked most often. How on earth do you find a good, skilful, competent aesthetic practitioner when there is still no national register of people who are the real deal  – highly trained professionals who are great at what they do, will listen to your concerns and treat you accordingly, so that you end up looking fabulous and natural?

It’s a big deal

Thanks to the dire lack of regulation of the aesthetic medicine industry in the UK, anyone – you and me included – can buy ourselves some needles and filler online and start injecting anyone we like. There’s no legal requirement to take a certain amount of training – or any training, in fact. No requirement to show competence, or to meet any standards of practice. Yes, this contributes hugely to the amount of terrible work that we all see. There are tens of thousands of lousy injectors out there, and they are the ones responsible for the vast majority of the faces that look weird and the number of people who end up with botched procedures. It also makes it vital that you do proper research into whoever you are planning to entrust your face to.

Yes, there are so many great practitioners

One of the main reasons that I set up The Tweakments Guide is that, after many years working with the best providers in the aesthetics industry, I know that there is a lot of excellence out there. A lot of nurses and doctors and dentists and surgeons who are highly skilled in delivering injectable treatments that create subtle enhancements for their patients. So I set up the Practitioner Finder on this website, to provide a list of practitioners based all around the UK whom I would trust to treat my face because – they’re good.

How to spot the good from the bad?

Whether you get a recommendation from a friend, pick someone from the TTG register or find someone in your local area, you want to know that they are not just safe, but highly skilled and experienced. Here’s your checklist:

1. Find a medical professional…

Why? Because then they’re accountable to an industry body such as the GMC (General Medical Council), the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) or the GDC (General Dental Council) so that if anything goes wrong, that organisation can take up your complaint

2. … with specialised training in aesthetics…

Just having a medical background isn’t enough (my GP is a medical professional, obviously, but I wouldn’t want her offering me tweakments unless I knew she had undertaken a lot of specialist training in aesthetic procedures. Practitioners should also keep their skills up to date – the techniques uses for injections are evolving the whole time.

3. …and lots of experience…

Training is one thing, but putting this training into practice, which is how they refine their expertise.  I’ve yet to meet an injector who doesn’t say that their skills have improved over the years.

4. …plus an artistic eye…

And on top of that, you want someone with an artistic eye, someone who can create real enhancement in your face. How to find that out? Take a look at examples of their work on their website or social media. Do the faces they’ve treated look in proportion? Are they treating the whole face so that it looks balanced and lovely?

5. …who can handle complications…

They should have training in recognising and handling complications. What happens if you have an allergic reaction? Rare, but you need to find out all these things about them to know that you are in safe hands.  

6. …and has a prescribing qualification…

If they do, then, should anything go wrong with your fillers and they need dissolving, your practitioner will be able to access the dissolving agent, which is a prescription medicine.

7. What’s their own face like?

If you’re after a very natural look, and a practitioner looks, to your eye, a tad ‘done’, then maybe you’re not going to be a great match. Better to wait and find someone who seems the kind of person to whom you could entrust your face.  

 There’s more detail on the TTG Staying Safe page.