Aesthetic academies

The landscape of non-surgical aesthetics has changed dramatically in the last 10 years, in both size and nature, changing from niche premium practice to mass market, accessible-to-all availability. There has been a notable decline in the quality of injectors, with a more recent, and seemingly exponential, rise in the number of academies selling profitable, but unsupported, certifications of competence to unwitting students. An industry that was once saturated with rogue practitioners is now beset by rogue, self-styled ‘academies’, which are emerging at a troubling rate.

This epidemic of questionable new training companies has not gone unnoticed. Following complaints by the Joint Council for Cosmetic Practitioners (JCCP), the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) conducted investigations. The complaints against three companies, Boss Babes Uni (ASA, 2019a), Aesthetics Lounge Academy (2019b) and the Aesthetics Uni (2019c) were upheld by the ASA, and the companies were found to have breached ASA codes 3.1–3.3.