Roaring in the 2020s: make some noise for the future of aesthetics

The Keogh Report was triggered following the PIP breast implant scandal that impacted around 50 000 women within the UK. It exposed ‘woeful lapses in product quality, aftercare and record-keeping—widespread use of misleading advertising, inappropriate marketing and unsafe practices right across the sector’ (Department of Health and Social Care, 2013).

Standards of care post-Keogh continue to spiral downwards; regardless of the advent of three recent voluntary aesthetic/cosmetic registers, the added intervention by the Advertising Standards Agency and Committees of Advertising Practice and guidance issued by our mandatory regulators.

Within the aesthetic sector, it is estimated that around 90% of patients are women (British Association of Aesthetic and Plastic Surgeons, 2015), with the numbers of men remaining at around 10%. In the foreword of his seminal report, Professor Sir Bruce Keogh wrote that ‘those having cosmetic interventions are often vulnerable—they take their safety as a given and assume regulation is already in place to protect them’ (Department of Health and Social Care, 2013).