Every few months, a patient arrives at my consultation with a bag — and in the bag, usually, are several supplement bottles. Collagen drinks, collagen powders, marine collagen peptides. She wants to know if they’re working. Or, more precisely, she wants me to confirm that they’re working because she has been taking them consistently for eight months and feels invested. I take the question seriously. Not because the supplements industry […]

A patient came in last year asking about HIFU — High Intensity Focused Ultrasound. She’d seen it advertised everywhere, read the marketing language, and arrived with what I’d describe as cautious optimism. She was fifty-one. Her concern was jowling and neck laxity. She’d had one session at another clinic eighteen months earlier, seen almost no change, and wanted to know whether she had done something wrong or whether the treatment […]

There’s a particular look I can spot from across a waiting room. I’m not proud of that — it means it’s visible from that distance. Cheeks that sit slightly too high, slightly too round, with a quality of fullness that doesn’t move with the rest of the face. The nasolabial folds paradoxically more visible, not less. The whole mid-face looking somehow compressed, like a fruit that has been slightly overripe. […]