Before and after photos: what a med spa site has to show alongside them

The before and after gallery is the most persuasive thing on a med spa website and the most likely to attract a complaint. Both facts come from the same place: it is an advertising claim made in pictures, and it is governed as one.

The rule is about typicality, not warnings

Federal advertising expectations are that results shown represent what a typical patient can expect. A gallery assembled from the best six outcomes of three hundred is a problem however genuine each photograph is, and a line saying results vary does not resolve it, because the question being asked is what results are typical rather than whether the reader was warned.

• Name the treatment, the number of sessions and the time elapsed on every case. Without those, the image is not evidence of anything.
• Keep the photographic conditions identical between the two shots. Changed lighting or angle is the most common reason an honest result reads as edited.
• Show enough cases to be representative. A highlight reel is the format the rule is aimed at.

A patient who agreed to a procedure has not agreed to appear in your advertising. Marketing use needs its own written authorisation, and it should be revocable. That has a build consequence people miss: you need to be able to remove one patient from every page they appear on, quickly. A gallery hard-coded across six service pages makes that a developer ticket, and a withdrawn authorisation then sits live for a fortnight. A gallery driven by a content collection makes it a two-minute edit.

State rules sit on top of the federal ones

Medical boards regulate who may be described as a doctor, which credentials must appear beside a provider's name, and in several states whether a specific outcome may be promised at all. This is not resolvable from an article, including this one. It is a question for the practice's medical director and its own counsel, and the job of the build is to leave somewhere for the answer to live: a credential line beside each provider, and a disclaimer component that can be placed per page and per claim rather than buried in a footer.

The rest of what a site in this vertical has to do, including why pricing silence costs more than it saves, is on our med spa page. The advertising platform side, which has its own certification requirements, is in getting a healthcare advert approved.