As doctors, we enter medicine with a shared purpose – to diagnose and treat diseases, alleviate suffering, restore function, do good and, where possible, save lives. The disciplines traditionally regarded as the pillars of medicine – emergency medicine, surgery, oncology, cardiology, intensive care – carry an obvious gravity because the consequences of disease are immediate and often life-threatening. It is therefore unsurprising that aesthetic medicine has, at times, found itself questioned within the wider medical community.