I was at NorthPark the other day and noticed, right across from Barneys New York, something called Klinger Advanced Aesthetics, which sounds like a college course but looks like a place Katherine Helmond might visit in the movie Brazil. Turns out, it's very much the latter: a place where the ladies can get their hairs cut and their feets scrubbed and their nails polished and their special places waxed and buffed. But it' so much, much more. And maybe the ladies knew about it. Me, not until I read The New York Times this morning and realized that I had been walking past the ground zero of the debate between beauty and medicine.
Turns out Klinger's place--which I initially thought was run by Jamie Farr till the missus set me straight--is a full-service Botoxery. Really, does anything scream NorthPark through barely moving lips more than a salon where you can get Botox and Restylane injections? Thought not. Says The Paper of Record:
"That Klinger has a medical office in its full-service beauty emporium — virtually attached to a Sephora store — has generated charges that it is blurring the line between beauty and medicine.But what really has the medical community riled up is Klinger's partnerships with the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Johns Hopkins Medicine, giving it and its entire business model the imprimatur of academia.
Further, Klinger intends to take that business model, which includes using nurse practitioners to do injections, and sell it to physicians who won't necessarily have dermatology or plastic surgery training.
Klinger and its partners see their venture as convenience medicine."
Speaking of, I know a guy who will sell you flat-screens and flu shots out of his apartment. Wanna come with? --Robert Wilonsky
