Elle Reid is a qualified dentist, with experience as a Senior House Officer in a maxillofacial department as well as working with facial trauma patients in A&E. Elle trained in 2015 to deliver dermal fillers and anti-wrinkle injections. She started her facial aesthetics business the following year and has since expanded to six more locations across Newcastle, Durham and Sunderland. We asked Elle about the importance of her dentistry qualifications in relation to facial aesthetics and why she believes there is a growing marketplace for treatments.
You have many clients choosing from a range of treatments. What is your favourite treatment to perform?
Aesthetics has always been something that has interested me because it makes a real difference to my clients. I always take a full face approach to my aesthetics and enjoy providing a combination of treatments in the form of facial contouring.
By understanding the ideal facial proportions of both men and women, I like combining the use of muscle relaxing injections and dermal fillers to balance and complement certain features of the face such lifting the cheekbones, feminising the chin and jawline balancing them with the nose and lips.
I love how the results from non-surgical aesthetics treatments are in most cases instant if not develop over the following couple of weeks with little or no downtime for my clients. As facial contouring, even with subtle results, can have such a huge impact – showing my client their end results is my favourite part of treatment, I often have clients send me selfies showing off their subtle enhancements.
What’s the most requested treatment?
Easily lips. I feel this reflects the current trends in beauty. Ever since Kylie Jenner announced she has undergone lip augmentation the popularity for lip fillers has boomed, and despite her now claiming to have had hers removed, the demand doesn’t appear to have subsided.
In my opinion, every lip augmentation should be bespoke. The lips should be treated in harmony with the rest of the face taking into consideration the facial proportions and features. There are so many different techniques that can be applied to lip augmentation you can really have a lot of fun with them creating perfectly proportioned pouts that the clients love.
What do you find most rewarding about working as an aesthetic practitioner?
My clients come to me with something that they want to correct or enhance about themselves and we work together to make a plan to give them the results they want.
Aesthetics treatments are always elective, meaning you are providing treatments that the clients want. There is nothing more satisfying than handing a client a mirror after completing treatment and seeing their reaction to their results.
Many of my clients come back to me which means I build a relationship and rapport with them without the time constraints imposed on me in other areas of work. For me, this gives me a high level of job satisfaction.
At present, the cosmetic surgery industry is booming, particularly in the field of facial aesthetics. There is constantly new techniques, products and procedures coming on to the market.
On a personal level, it is exciting to be advancing my career in an area that is not only in high demand but is changing and developing so much.
How do you think training to inject Botulinum Toxin can improve your dental practice?
As a dentist, I feel I am ideally placed to offer aesthetics treatments. Undoubtedly there is a crossover between our regular dental patients and aesthetics clients.
It is a combination of getting to know your dental patients and being able to see the bigger picture. And like most dentists, I was to keep as many of my patients as possible and that means offering both the dental and aesthetic services that patients are now looking for.
How do you think we can improve the safety of the aesthetic industry?
Being an aesthetics practitioner can potentially be quite isolating unless you reach out to other practitioners both locally and nationally.
Experience, knowledge and continued professional development are key to maintaining your own professional standards and ensuring safe practice. By sharing experiences with other practitioners and forming a network around you we can all continue to improve on our own patient care.
I am a big advocate of peer review and shadowing. In my practice, I have senior practitioners who I can seek advice from as well as regularly inviting practitioners to shadow my own work.
In Newcastle, I have established a group of other dental care professionals who meet at the University to discuss everything on aesthetics from managing or preventing complications, injection technique and product choice.
Educating patients is also as important, I always discuss my professional background and encourage clients to do their own research. Ultimately you can’t stop a client from seeking treatment from a non-health care professional but you can highlight the importance of a professionally trained practitioner.
What advice would you give to dentist looking for a facial aesthetics training provider?
Do your research! Every training provider takes a different approach to training. My tips would be to;
- Speak to others who have trained – it is likely they have trained with a variety of providers.
- Choose an accredited provider – many courses hold the title of being accredited, but who the course is accredited by should be an important decider. By choosing a course that is accredited by Ofqual you know that the training provided is regulated and adheres to standards suggested by Health Education England (HEE). Look for courses that are CPD-certified.
- Choose a course that provides adequate theoretical and clinical learning – whether it is to start your learning with a foundation level course or to top up skills with an advanced course, look for a course that will provide sufficient theoretical teaching before, during and after the course.
- Understand exactly how much hands-on experience you will get on the course – find out the ratio of students to one trainer. The bigger the group, the less hands-on experience you are likely to experience.
- Support – look for a provider that offers you support following your training. It can be in the form of social media forums or links to the trainers – this help is invaluable to newly trained delegates.
