Andrew Rudnick snickered when he first saw a medical spa offering Botox and laser hair-removal services on a visit to a Las Vegas mall in 2002. He laughed at the thought of someone - anyone - shopping for the latest fashions, grabbing a bite to eat and then, oh yeah, strolling in for a quick shot of Botox to zap out a nasty wrinkle.
"I couldn't understand why anybody in a mall would walk in and have their legs lasered, never mind Botox," he recalled. He parked himself on a bench near the spa and watched in amazement as shoppers strolled in. He owned a weight-loss and laser center in Boston at the time, and the sight was a revelation. "I counted the traffic in and out and saw the revenue."
Returning to Boston, he scouted retail locations. He dropped the weight-loss part of his business to focus on skin care and laser treatments, renamed the company and opened his first Sleek MedSpa that same year. He has since opened six more - near Boston and in New York and Florida, all in upscale malls or retail areas. "It took off like a bat out of hell," he said.
Thanks in part to television shows like Extreme Makeover and Nip/Tuck, the number of Americans seeking chemical peels, laser procedures, Botox shots and wrinkle-filler injections is soaring. According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS), such "noninvasive" treatments have increased more than 700 percent since 1997. Botox received Food and Drug Administration approval in 2002.
The stampede of doctors and entrepreneurs rushing to fill that demand has left some doctors and plastic-surgery trade groups wondering about the expertise of some of the people providing these services. For many Americans, price and convenience come first, with few questions about the experience and qualifications of the person injecting the treatments.
For its part, Sleek MedSpa says some of its outlets have on-site physicians while others have doctors as medical directors off-site and nurse practitioners and physician's assistants who handle day-to-day treatments. If there were an emergency a nurse couldn't handle, the nurse would call 911, Rudnick said. He added that no such emergency had ever arisen.
Kim Wanderley, 39, a stay-at-home mom from Parkland, Florida, said she thought it was "great" when she spotted a Sleek MedSpa at the Town Center mall in Boca Raton in 2006. "If it had been in Ohio, people might have blinked twice, but this is South Florida," where vanity rules, she said. "People do not take aging lightly, without a fight."
While Sleek MedSpas lack the feng shui ambience of a traditional beauty spa, they don't exude the sterile atmosphere of a doctor's office, either. The spa in Boca Raton is contemporary and sophisticated, Wanderley said, with videos of cosmetic procedures streaming across a flat screen, skin-care products lining another wall and before-and-after picture brochures scattered around the waiting room.
And it's convenient. "I can be in and out in a half-hour," she said, and "it gives me an excuse to go to the mall afterward to do a little shopping." If a procedure causes redness or bruising, the spa offers a convenient back-door exit.
Wanderley acknowledges that 10 years ago, she would have thought this "way too excessive and ridiculous," she said. "But now I'm one of the bozos on the bus." She started out requesting microdermabrasion facial treatments and has since added Botox shots and Restylane filler injections to her repertoire.
RSS