CPD Article: Beyond the Trend
Victoria Hiscock on how your clinic can champion and leverage the future of “ageing-well”
Thankfully, some trends go just as quickly as they come. Does anyone remember the temporary buzz around cleansing with sparkling water? No thanks. Luckily, other trends are less about a temporary fad and more about a movement – a positive direction of travel for the industry at large. The narrative around ageing is finally changing, and it’s an opportunity for us all to embrace life at every age – focusing on energy, vitality and health-span instead of denying our age - and it’s a movement that clinics and practitioners are uniquely placed to lead. We, the professionals, can represent this trend to reduce age-shame and appearance anxiety while boosting confidence, self-esteem and self-acceptance for the collective- all while leveraging key words, search terms and trending topics for growth.
In this article, you’ll find specific guidance on how to embody this trend if you want to be a part of this movement —from the treatment menu to the consultation script, we’ll explore simple language swaps that signal age-respect, not age-rejection. This is about tangible ways to position your practice as part of the pro-ageing, ageing-well, age-empowered future.
When your clinic walks the walk – not just talks the trend – you don’t just attract more clients. You build trust. You build reputation. You build a brand that speaks to something deeper: care without criticism.
WHAT IS THE TREND?
Of course, trends are open to interpretation, but arguably the best way to describe “ageing well” is the redefinition of the phrase “looking good for your age.”
Once upon a time, “looking good for your age” simply meant looking young, and “anti-ageing” was one of the most popularly searched terms. The industry seemingly agreed by reflecting that back to consumers: Ageing is bad. Erase the lines. Freeze the movement. Deny the time.
But things have moved on:
- Regenerative medicine, longevity and biohacking are dominating medical and skincare arenas
- Menopausal empowerment has arrived and perimenopause has entered the conversation
- ‘Perception shift’ related overdone, poorly done aesthetic work is triggering alarm and worry, not celebration, from society at large
- Communities are rejecting uber air-brushed images and embracing real skin campaigns
- We’re all living longer, working smarter, sleeping deeper. We care about what goes into our bodies and how that shows up on them.
“Looking good for your age” now means looking well, healthy and vibrant. On a skin-deep level, it means having energy and expanding not just your lifespan, but your health-span. We know more than ever about how the body ages on a cellular level, and the ways to slow that down are ever increasing - so ageing isn’t the big shift away from health and vibrancy that it once was - and is therefore not so much of a perceived problem.
Hence, “anti-ageing” is outdated. “anti-ageing” no longer reflects the science or the sentiment behind this evolving industry. And anyway, the only way to truly avoid ageing altogether is to go six feet under—a dramatic pursuit in avoiding lines and wrinkles.
WHAT DOES THIS TREND MEAN FOR YOUR CLINIC?
You and your clinic team can be a part of this positive movement that embraces all life stages. As with anything embodied, it’s more than a surface-level gesture. It’s more than the odd Instagram post or in-clinic event. It’s about total integration of the approach—from social media communications to consultation scripts and the language used on your treatment menu. The impact can be immense, from positively impacting the self-esteem of your ageing patients to leveraging trending SEO keywords for web traffic and positioning yourself at the forefront of innovation to boost your credibility.
WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT?
Here are some tangible steps to embody the trend in your clinic:
First Impressions
To ensure end-to-end integration of this trend, start at the beginning, where your new patients first find and get to know you. First up, start by leveraging keywords and trending phrases around the topic in your new copywriting for social media or campaigns.
These change often, but some steadfast SEO terms include ‘well-ageing skincare’, ‘pro-ageing skincare’ and ‘skincare for mature skin’. Long-tail or concern-specific terms include ‘ageing-well skincare guide’, ‘routine for ageing skin’ and ‘retinol for mature skin’. Trend-related terms include ‘skin rejuvenation’, ‘skin longevity tips’ and ‘best products for ageing well’.
This also means an audit of your static copy on your social media account (name/bio, etc), your website, and marketing activities.
Start by switching “anti-ageing” with “Ageing-Well”, “pro-ageing”, or any other positive replacement, and amend any language that presents wrinkles, lines, and sagging skin as a problem. Instead, you might choose to use positive language around smoothing, firming, and lifting. Some age-positive phrases may include:
“Keep the smile lines, dissolve the unnecessary wrinkles.”, or “Respect the years. Refresh the surface.”, or “You don’t need to stop the clock to love the skin you’re in”, and more.
Your offering
Next stop is an exploration of your treatment menu. This includes both the names of any treatments geared towards ageing skin, in a similar exercise to the one above. The second stage is looking at the treatments themselves. Does your offering reflect a positive approach to ageing? Does it include regenerative procedures, ingredients, or formulas?
Does it reflect your sentiment toward this trend? If not, perhaps it’s time to expand your treatment offering to include ageing-well treatments.
Age-related wellness offerings and well-being support
You can expand your offering to include positive support at varying stages of ageing (hormonal support, nutrition and gut health, etc) without becoming a jack of all trades by collaborating with satellite practitioners who offer well-being services. Consider collaborating with experts in different fields – nutrition, hormone health, mental health, and general well-being or stress reduction therapies. You could also consider packages for specific life-stages like The Longevity Glow Plan, The Pro-Ageing Reset, Skin Confidence Club (Subscription-Based) or The Hormonal Harmony Package.
Solidifying your position
If you’re already content with your treatment menu and believe that it reflects this positive movement and your sentiment toward ageing well, or once you’ve adjusted your treatment menu so that it does, it’s time to make some noise about it.
An event, a marketing campaign, an open day – there are many ways that you can work with the reps of the brands you collaborate with and other practitioners in the field to raise awareness of your approach to aesthetic medicine and skincare, solidifying your position as a supporter of Ageing-Well, from topics on feeling good in your skin in your 40s, 50s, 60s, to menopause and HRT-friendly skincare and treatments, you can cover different areas of Ageing-Well and ask some of your practitioners to share their stories about what Ageing-Well means to them. This can be done across multiple touchpoints – from social media posts to in-person events.
Your Clinic team: Walking the walk
As you plan and strategise to embody this trend on every level of your business, staff training should be happening simultaneously. If, after doing all this work to promote Ageing-Well, you or one of your team sit with a patient and talk negatively about ageing skin, it will undo all your hard work.
Training your staff on any new treatments, products, and third-party services will obviously be essential, but so will supporting them in using new language. It’s about moving away from anti-ageing and representing ageing-well in every consultation and interaction.
If you have a skin imaging device, this means new language around the wrinkles index – avoiding statements like “your wrinkle score is low/bad,” and switching them for statements like: “Wrinkles are a natural part of the evolving face, but we can re-energise the cells deep down so that they represent the age you actually are, and don’t give the impression that you’re older than your years as this scan result suggests.”
Measuring success
Success is about measuring what’s working well—and doing more of it. This will help guide you to evolve your offerings, services, and activities. You can also use any metrics you gather from surveys, etc, to further support your campaigns, advertising, and client engagement.
Short surveys or poll links can be integrated into your salon software so that patients receive them automatically after a treatment. You might include questions like:
“Do you feel our clinic supports you in Ageing-well, not just looking younger?”, “Do you feel seen, heard, and supported at your age and life-stage?”. This may then yield stats you can use in your future campaigns, such as “99% of our clients say they feel seen, heard and supported at their age and life-stage – book your consultation now”.
In summary
The Ageing-Well movement is a distinct trend that embraces ageing with intention, focusing on skin health, radiance, longevity, and self-acceptance, not reversing time.
Replacing the sentiment of “anti-ageing” with the empowering “ageing-well” trend is a positive shift for appearance anxiety, social inclusion, and our collective self-esteem, and you have the opportunity to be part of the shift if you want to be.
Remember, this amazing industry is a community working collectively for the greater good. If someone you know is doing this well, why not contact them? Ask how they do it, collaborate and share ideas. This is an exciting time to be in the skincare and aesthetics space, and together we can solidify the shift from ageing-shame to ageing-celebration.