Scottish Medical Aesthetics Safety Group representatives Jacqueline Cooney and James Cooney argue that proposed Scottish aesthetics regulation is not strong enough.
In 2013, Sir Bruce Keogh published the lengthy Review of the Regulation of Cosmetic Interventions report, advocating for improvement in the regulation of cosmetic procedures in the UK.1 However, what followed was a twelve-year window of opportunity sustaining the exponential growth of non-medical members of the public injecting prescription-only medicines (POMs), dermal fillers and other unknown imported substances purchased online.
In the past year, there has been some urgency towards stricter regulation in this sector, with new legislation promised by Spring.2 However, as representatives of the Scottish Medical Aesthetics Safety Group (SMASG), we argue that the aesthetics licensing scheme proposed by the Scottish Government contains serious flaws and risks.3
The proposed regulation
Like the UK's proposed red, amber and green treatment classification system,4 the Scottish Government's proposal has group options 1, 2 and 3, which delineate treatments by risk into defined…
