How Med Spas Conquered America
Revenue is growing at double-digit rates, fueled by surging demand for Botox, lip fillers and weight-loss drugs.
If you start at the corner of Fifth Street in Brooklyn and walk south along Fifth Avenue, it doesn’t take long before you notice a pattern: Every block or two, you’ll pass another storefront advertising the latest in aesthetic enhancements. Some of them specialize in lasers to zap unwanted hair or resurface skin. Others offer injections of all kinds—Botox, lip filler, fat dissolver, butt plumper. You can get CoolSculpted, Emsculpted or Sculptra’d.
After 10 minutes or so, you’ll have passed at least six med spas. (For the uninitiated, that’s short for “medical spas.”) If you’d walked north instead, you’d have seen another two or three, plus a few more tucked away on side streets. All these businesses coexist in Park Slope, a New York City neighborhood that, though wealthy, is usually stereotyped as a haven for crunchy parents who name their kids things like Phineas or Andromeda and feed them only organic produce. Not necessarily the people you’d assume could keep almost a dozen Botox-and-hair-removal depots in business within a one-mile radius.