Welcome to Aesthetic Mentor – A little bit of our history!

Hello. Welcome to the Aesthetic Mentor Blog. This is hopefully the first of many posts that you’ll see. I’m Dr. Russo, a Harvard-trained board-certified plastic surgeon, and I work just outside of Boston. I’m really good at teaching people aesthetics.

I’ve been in the field for, as I said, 30 years. And believe it or not, when I started, there really wasn’t much to esthetics, aside from surgery. And even then it was kind of looked down upon to do plastic surgery for esthetic reasons.

Obviously, things have changed a lot. But if you think back, there were no neurotoxins, there were no fillers, there were no lasers, there was no radiofrequency or ultrasound, no Kybella, and none of the things that we have become used to.

And I have seen the birth of all of these devices and technologies. And, you know, in those 30 years, it’s been amazing. It got us to the point where now we’re treating people at much younger ages, noninvasive or minimally invasive therapies, and treatments, and they’re able to stay looking youthful for a long, long time.

When I first started. People waited till they were old and tried to look young. And that’s hard to do, particularly if you only have surgery as an option. But as time went on, we’ve got to the point where we are now, where younger people, millennials, and even beyond have really focused on looking youthful and staying youthful.

So we had fortunately, the technology has sort of driving it, but it’s also kind of caught up with it in that now we can keep people looking younger for a long, long time. And that’s much easier than trying to take someone who’s old and trying to look young.

So my purpose here on this blog is to help you, is to share my wisdom, my experience with you, my thoughts about the future to help you get started aesthetics of, if you haven’t already, to encourage you to do so.

And also, we’ll be taking on topics, you know, sort of more advanced topics about different kinds of treatments. But, you know, my primary goal is to give back. It’s been a really good ride for me. And I’ve really enjoyed being in aesthetics.

And I want to sort of steer you away from things that don’t work. I want to give you good approaches that treat patients. I want you to understand the psychology that we have to deal with as providers. And the thing that I have done is I’ve founded a school called the Aesthetic Mentor and I’m the Aesthetic Mentor.

So as the founder, it was really important to me to be able to help people get into this field. And I was one of the first people that started training nurses to do this. And believe me, a lot of my colleagues weren’t happy with it.

They felt that I was taking from them. But honestly, my thought was, well, if I don’t train people, do you think that people are going to say “Oh, I can’t do the aesthetics cause Dr. Russo wasn’t in teaching anymore. So we’re just going to go back to our nursing job at the hospital”. I said, of course, that’s never going to happen. They’ll find training somewhere else. It won’t be as good. They won’t get trained. They won’t have the confidence. They’ll have maybe some adverse events. It’ll get on the front page of the newspaper, you know, it’ll bring the whole industry down.

So I thought, why not be the leader in the field? Why not lead the educational component?

And my goal had been to become the gold standard in aesthetic education. I think I’ve accomplished that. So I have a school, as I mentioned, the Aesthetic Mentor, our primary campus is in Waltham, Massachusetts. We also have a school in Connecticut, and we have expansion plans well beyond that.

And our goal is simple. We want to take someone who’s perhaps never done this before, maybe is psych nurse. Maybe you’re an administrative nurse, maybe you are a pediatric nurse or whatever.

We can take you and using my safe injection program to train you so that you are a compliant, comforted, and competent injector. It isn’t easy. And over the years, we’ve made many, many adjustments. And in fact, during Covid, we made some huge changes in that we went from being in person, learning all the time where I was here, you know, 12 hours or so a day. We did our didactic. We did our demonstrations. We get our hands on all in the same day. It was exhausting for everyone. So we changed that with Covid. And we had to we started going to zoom meetings, but then we really realized the way to do this most effectively is to put it on demand. So you can download, for example, our introduction to neurotoxin course, which is the first course we think you should take. And then once you downloaded it, you can review it. It takes about four to five hours.

There are some questions in the presentation that ask you “what’s the muscle?”, kind of test yourself to make sure you’re understanding all the material. And once you get through that, you can come in for your hands-on at the beginning of a hands-on we have a didactic training by Dr. Mourre and some of our other videos. And you just kind of reviews all the things that I think were important for you to know. Then you jump right into your hands up.

And usually, we have somewhere between five to 10 models for every student, which in this industry is unheard of. And in addition, our ratio of students to teachers is two to one. And if you’re really lucky, sometimes we have a one-to-one.

So you’re injecting with somebody’s looking directly at. Making sure that you’re safe at all times. The other student is participating in that experience by, you know, answering questions about dose and location and for example, the neurotoxin would be placed. So it’s highly supervised.

It’s certainly a little bit nerve-wracking when you first start because people are just like really not sure what they’re doing. They have never done this before. But after you’ve done a few patients, it just gets easier and easier and easier because you’re kind of doing the same thing over and over again.

Then after you’ve completed that, you have the opportunity to take what we call “Practice session” and practice sessions are just what they say. You can bring in a model or two or even takes a lot from our model list. And you’re working one on one with your instructor and your instructor is helping you. And, you know, it’s not like we’re really holding your hand. We’re sort of letting you see what letting us see what you can do.

And obviously, if you stop me, I’m sure there’s someone there to help you. And you can take one or more practice sessions, depending upon how well you learn the stuff and how good you are with your fine motor control.

And once you’ve gotten to the point where the instructor says, you know what, I think you’re ready for your signoff, then you’re ready to go to that. And the off is more like a driver’s test, you know, when you’re in the car with the driving instructor. They’re not teaching you anything. They’re not even talking to you usually. And so you’re showing them what you can do if you hit the curb or you go through a red light or you hit a pedestrian. We’re definitely not getting your license.

Same thing here. If you go to your sign-up and you really aren’t able to be proficient and safe and understand the anatomy and understand dosing, then, we don’t pass you when you go back to your practice sessions.

Once you get signed off, you’re ready to go and start buying products and treating patients. And we understand that our school that there has to be a way of continuing your education. So in the next post, we’re going to talk about how to bridge the gap between getting that education and then sort of actually practicing the safe, compliant fashion.

Make sure you follow us on Instagram with @aestheticmentor and subscribe to our YouTube channel because it’s going to be a lot of fun. You’re going to have a lot of learning. I’m really looking forward.

You can also watch this content on the video below.