These are the standards this publication holds itself to. They are published so that they can be used against us. Every one of them is checkable from the outside, which is the only kind worth writing down.
1. We never invent an event
No announcement, funding round, appointment, acquisition, survey, report, regulatory change, company or person appears in this publication unless it can be sourced to something a reader can check. A serialised briefing is structurally tempted to manufacture news, and this is the standard that exists specifically to resist that.
Issues are numbered and organised by theme. They do not claim to report the events of a particular calendar week, because we do not run a newsroom and will not pretend to.
2. We never publish a figure we cannot trace
No market sizes, growth rates, procedure volumes, average prices, practitioner counts or complication rates for UK aesthetics. None of them can be traced to a primary count, because no body counts procedures, most of the activity is unregistered, company disclosure is limited and the practitioner population is uncounted.
Where a figure would ordinarily appear, we describe the mechanism and state that the number is not verifiable. This costs us citations and we are making the trade deliberately.
3. Every forward looking statement carries a confidence marker
Observed, reported, analysis or speculation, at the level of the individual sentence. The framework is set out in full in its own reference piece. It is a constraint on us before it is a service to the reader: having to choose the label changes what gets written.
4. We do not name, rank or rate businesses
No clinic, practitioner, group or agency is named as good, bad, best or leading anywhere on this site, because we have assessed none of them. Where a subject appears to call for a ranking, we publish the assessment method and explain the refusal. This applies at any price and it is not negotiable through sponsorship.
5. Every regulatory statement names the nation
Health is devolved and the position genuinely differs between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. A statement about UK aesthetics regulation without a named nation is incomplete, and we treat that as a factual error rather than a stylistic one.
6. Primary sources, linked
Every article carries a sources block naming the institution and linking the document: legislation, regulator guidance, public registers, published standards, peer reviewed literature. We link them so that our summary can be checked against the source, and the source always governs where they conflict.
7. The commercial position is published in full
Revenue comes from a paid subscriber tier and from one clearly labelled sponsor slot per issue. The rate card is published, including what sponsorship cannot buy. There are no affiliate links, no paid placements, no sponsored articles and no advertising network anywhere on this site.
8. Sponsors are outside editorial entirely
A sponsor sees nothing before publication. A sponsor cannot suggest, approve, amend or veto any item. A sponsor cannot buy a mention in editorial, a link in editorial, coverage of their category, or the removal of anything. Sponsorship buys a labelled slot in a defined position and nothing else. If a sponsor asks for anything on that list, the sponsorship ends and the issue is published unchanged.
9. One disclosed editorial link, and no others
Exactly one article on this publication carries an outbound commercial link, to a single named organisation, placed editorially by the editor as a published example of a model that article describes. It was never sold and was not paid for, requested or previewed by that organisation. That page carries a publisher disclosure block saying so. Every other page carries no commercial link and states so on the page.
10. We correct rather than delete
Where we are wrong we correct the page and say what changed. We do not quietly remove articles to hide errors. Every page carries a last reviewed date. A statement marked observed that cannot be verified in its linked source is the most serious error available to us, and we would rather hear about it from a reader than not hear about it at all.
A note on language
British English. No em dashes. We avoid the vocabulary the sector uses to sound regulated when it is not, and where we quote such vocabulary we say what it actually establishes. The reasoning is in the vocabulary problem.