Great skin, no waiting: Medical spas tap a whole new market
Five years ago, you had to go to a dermatologist or a plastic surgeon for treatment of skin conditions such as acne, excess hair, photo-aging, or frown lines. You waited for an appointment beforehand and had recovery time afterward. Today, you can go to what’s called a medical spa, on your lunch hour. Welcome to the world of the medical spa.
Case in point: Nara Luxury Medical Spa, a medical spa which offers FDA-approved procedures such as microdermabrasion, botox injections, laser hair removal and reflexology and massage. Nara’s medical treatments hardly existed five years ago.Joy Thompson, managing director of Nara, says the availability of less expensive, higher-performance and more versatile technology has taken skin-enhancement procedures out of the doctor’s office and into a wider arena.
The American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery reports that for 2004, the most recent year data is available, more than 9.7 million minimally-invasive non-surgical procedures were performed, up 51 percent from the 6.4 million such procedures done in 2003.
Companies such as Palomar Medical Technologies have benefited from the boom. "If we had the same technologies we had five years ago, we wouldn’t have these market opportunities," says Palomar CEO Joseph Caruso. Palomar, a publicly-held company that develops and markets light-based systems for hair removal and other cosmetic procedures, has seen exponential growth. From 2002 through 2004, the company more than doubled its revenue from $25 million to $54.4 million. For the first nine months of 2005, the Burlington, MA company’s revenues stood at $54.5 million, with net income of $12 million. Palomar isn’t alone. Wayland-based laser maker Candela Corp. has also posted strong gains.
Today’s cosmetic systems are 10 times faster and far more versatile than their predecessors of a decade ago, making them attractive to spas. They yield more procedures per spa, less time per client, and a wider variety of procedures. And because spas have lower overhead than physicians’ offices, they can open up the market to a much wider audience.
But buyers should beware. Regulations on medical spas are still in their infancy, and vary by state. Nara, as a medical spa, is supervised by an MD and has medical grade equipment. But in the non-medical market sector, Thompson says, there are no standards set for minimum hours of training, on, say, laser hair removal or Botox injections. In a recent case, an East Boston beauty shop was shut down after a client was stricken ill after receiving a mineral-oil injection.
"I think because the technology is available, the sentiment is moving faster than the oversight groups can respond," Thompson says. "And the consumer demand is pushing all of this. It will be interesting to see how it fleshes out over the next year."
Christina P. O’Neill can be reached at coneill@wbjournal.com
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