Anti-wrinkle injections
It weakens specific muscles for a few months. It does not fill, lift, tighten or improve skin quality, and no amount of it will move a line that is not made by movement.
Dermal fillers
A gel that occupies space. Excellent at replacing volume that has gone, poor at everything the word 'lift' implies, and regulated far more loosely than most patients assume.
Lip filler
The most requested injectable site and the most frequently overtreated. Almost every bad outcome is the accumulation of small, reasonable decisions.
Skin boosters
Injectables sold on skin quality rather than shape. Real, modest, and consistently oversold by the word 'glow'.
Polynucleotides
The newest injectable category, sold on biology rather than on volume. Plausible, early, and priced as though the evidence were settled.
Chemical peels
A category with a huge internal range. The depth decides the result, the downtime and the risk, and the depth is rarely what the advert leads with.
Microneedling and RF
Frequently sold as one treatment with an optional extra. They are different procedures with different depths, different risks and different evidence.
Laser and IPL
Excellent for redness, pigment and hair, poor for texture and laxity, and highly dependent on matching the device to your skin tone.
Thread lifts
A real procedure with a real effect and a name that promises considerably more than the effect delivers.
Fat dissolving injections
A category where the regulatory question comes before the efficacy question, and where the answer to the first should determine whether you ask the second.
Belotero Revive
A specific product used to explain a whole category, including why the word in its original headline was doing more work than the treatment does.
This article contains no affiliate links, no sponsored placements and no links to any clinic, practitioner, brand or retailer. Nobody paid for it and nobody previewed it. We name no clinic in Glasgow because we have assessed none, and a publication that has not assessed a business has nothing useful to say about whether it is good.
Two archive pages on this site carry a single disclosed editorial link each, and both are labelled on the page itself. This is not one of them. The whole arrangement is set out in our editorial standards.
Nothing here is medical advice. Speak to a qualified clinician about your own case.
The monthly briefing
One email a month. What changed in Scottish regulation, what a treatment turned out not to do, and which claims are worth a second look.
One email a month at most. It carries a single clearly labelled sponsor line, which never influences what we write. No clinic buys a mention in the editorial part of it. Unsubscribe in one click.