How to check any aesthetic practitioner in ten minutes

Ask for their registration number and look it up. Nurses have an NMC PIN, searchable on the Nursing and Midwifery Council register. Doctors have a GMC number. Dentists and dental professionals are on the GDC register. All three are free and public.

What a clean result proves: that the person exists, is currently registered, and has no restriction on their practice. What it does not prove: anything at all about their aesthetic skill. Registration is a floor, not a recommendation.

If a practitioner is not on any statutory register, that is not automatically a reason to walk away — it is legal, and there are good non-medical injectors — but it does mean there is no regulator standing behind them, and the rest of this list matters more.

The Joint Council for Cosmetic Practitioners keeps a public register of practitioners who meet its standards. Save Face is an accredited register that independently verifies a practitioner's registration, training certificates, insurance and life support training, and assesses the clinic itself.

These are voluntary and practitioners pay to be on them, so they are third-party verification rather than disinterested regulation. That is still worth considerably more than a claim on a website, because someone other than the practitioner has looked at the paperwork.

Trade bodies are a different thing again. BAMAN is the professional association for medical aesthetic nurses; the ACE Group is the complications body. Membership signals engagement with the profession rather than a verification of credentials.

Ask what medical malpractice and professional indemnity cover they hold, who underwrites it, and whether it covers the specific treatment you are booking. Cover is often treatment-specific, and a policy that covers filler may not cover a treatment the practitioner has recently added.

A practitioner who cannot tell you the underwriter and the limit off the top of their head is telling you something about how closely they have read their own policy.

WHO PRESCRIBES, AND WILL THEY HAVE ASSESSED ME? For any treatment involving a prescription-only medicine, a prescriber must see you personally. Remote prescribing is against guidance and common.

DO YOU HOLD HYALURONIDASE ON SITE, AND ARE YOU TRAINED TO MANAGE A VASCULAR OCCLUSION? For filler, this is the question that matters most. The answer should be immediate and specific.

WHAT HAPPENS IF SOMETHING GOES WRONG — WHO DO I CALL, AND WHEN? You want a direct number and an honest answer about out-of-hours.

HOW MUCH OF THIS SPECIFIC TREATMENT DO YOU DO? Volume in the particular procedure is a better predictor than years in the industry.

Specific, unhesitating, and offered rather than extracted. A practitioner who is confident in their position will give you the PIN before you finish asking, name the underwriter, and tell you what they do not do as readily as what they do.

Defensiveness is the signal to take seriously. Not because every defensive practitioner is unsafe, but because you are about to let this person inject your face, and you are entitled to ask.

For the record, and so this page is not asking of others what it does not do itself: the NMC PIN, the full indemnity details including underwriter and policy number, the training and the prescribing arrangement at this clinic are all published on the credentials page, with links to the registers so you can check them rather than take our word for it.

Not all registers check the same things, and knowing what a badge actually certifies is the difference between reassurance and the appearance of it.

A statutory register is the one that carries a complaints route with teeth. The two voluntary ones add an aesthetics-specific standard on top, and Save Face is the only entry in that table where somebody has physically been to the premises.