Dr Dana Beiki.

Dr Dana Beiki came to the face through the science, and stayed for the people. He grew up in Nice, on the south coast of France, and trained first as a pharmacist and then as a photobiologist, long before he ever held a syringe.

His subject was light, and what it does to skin. At the University of Bath, his doctorate researched a treatment for skin cancer: a protocol that uses light and iron to destroy cancer cells. It works through oxidative stress, the same slow chemistry of light and time that also sits behind much of how a face ages. He had set out to study how skin is harmed, and came away understanding how it is kept.

It is the lens he brings to aesthetics now, and given his subject, the metaphor is almost literal: he sees the work in a different light. It was never, for him, about the injection. It is about reading a face the way he once read skin under a microscope, understanding what is happening beneath the surface before deciding whether to touch it at all. He trained in aesthetic medicine at the Derma Institute London to its highest certification, a Level 7, and prescribes in his own right, but the training only gave form to an instinct already there: to treat a face by how it is built, and intervene only where there is reason to.

The clinic takes its name from Charles Baudelaire, a poet he keeps returning to, and a measure of its discipline from him as well: nothing in excess. In practice, that means he will, more often than patients expect, advise doing less.