What actually happens at a first consultation (and why one in five ends without a booking)

The most common thing new patients tell me is how long they put off booking — months, sometimes years — because they expected a consultation to be a sales appointment with a stethoscope in the room. So let me walk you through the actual hour, in order, including the part where roughly one in five people leaves without booking anything. That number isn't a failure rate. It's the point.

Before anything else: your history

We start where any medical visit starts — history, medications, conditions, past treatments. It isn't ceremony. Blood thinners change bruising risk; a cold-sore history changes how we plan anything near the lips; isotretinoin in the past six months rules out some treatments entirely; pregnancy or breastfeeding defers injectables full stop. Bring your medication list, including the daily aspirin you forgot was a blood thinner.

If you've been treated elsewhere, whatever you know about past products and doses shortens the path to a plan that fits — and helps us avoid whatever you didn't like.

The exam is anatomy, not flattery

Then I look at your face — at rest, moving, from angles you don't use in the mirror. Not to catalogue flaws; to map what's structurally true. The exam is where 'I want my cheeks done' becomes a real conversation about whether volume loss, skin quality, or expression pattern is doing the thing you're noticing — because those are three different treatments, and one of them might be none.

You leave with a written plan, not a needle

Nothing is injected at a first consultation — no exceptions, no 'since you're here.' What you leave with is a written plan: product names, estimated units or syringes or sessions, and totals in plain numbers. The quote holds for 60 days, so you can take it home, compare it, sit with it. If a clinic's price is only good today, that's a pressure tactic wearing a lab coat.

Why one in five ends with no booking

Sometimes the treatment you came in for won't do what you're hoping it will, and we say so. Sometimes the timing is wrong — a wedding too close, a tan too fresh for laser. Sometimes the honest plan is smaller and less exciting than the one you walked in imagining. And sometimes everything checks out and you simply want time to think, which is exactly what a 60-day quote is for.

The $75 consultation fee is credited in full to your first treatment if you proceed. If you don't, you've spent $75 learning what's true about your own face from someone with no commission on the answer. I've had patients tell me it's the best money they didn't spend.