Clinical reference library — six injectables, three lifting devices

Ageing does not present as one problem. Volume loss and thinning of the skin itself have different causes, and within thinning, a face that has lost regenerative capacity is not the same as a face that has lost material.

Different problems need materials that work differently. A clinic holding one product will use that product on every face that walks in. That is why this clinic carries four classes across six products.

Injectables and devices do not work on the same tissue. An injectable supplies material to the dermis; a device puts heat into the layers beneath it. Heat applied to skin that has run out of material has little to contract; material added to a face whose structure has descended simply thickens what is already loose. Whether a clinic can plan the two together is, in practice, one of the more useful things to ask about.

Holding them and using them well are different things, though. So each reference separates what is evidence from what is expectation. The parts that rarely appear in promotional material — that a product cannot be reversed, that the evidence is thin, that this particular material will not fix your problem — are usually the parts that matter most in consultation.

Starting from a product name is the slow way round. Starting from what actually bothers you about your face right now is faster.

Most people match several rows at once. Deciding which problem dominates is most of what a consultation is for.

Injectables first, ordered by class, then the lifting devices. Each reference covers one item in full, and the Korean and English editions carry the same content.

From here on these are not injections but devices that work by heat. For all three, no clinical trial of the device itself is publicly available, and each reference keeps class-level evidence and device-level evidence clearly apart.

• They have an author. All are written and reviewed by Dr. Lee Chi-Hak, with the authoring clinic named at the foot of each page
• Prices are not listed. Korean medical advertising rules govern how treatment fees may be published; we give exact figures at consultation
• Limits of the evidence are stated alongside it. Where studies are small or long-term data absent, we say so. Unverified figures are left out rather than repeated
• We do not rank products against each other. For most of these pairings no head-to-head study exists, so there would be no basis for it
• Device references name the owner of the evidence. Class-level findings are never presented as if they were a study of the particular device
• They do not replace assessment. The same complaint can have different causes and therefore different answers. Read first, then decide together in consultation

This library was written and reviewed by Dr. Lee Chi-Hak, director of Miso Clinic in Daegu, South Korea. The clinic stocks six collagen boosters and skin boosters with genuinely different active materials — liquid PCL (GOURI), PN (Rejuran), hADM (Re2O, CellREDM) and CaHA (Radiesse, DCLASSY) — along with three lifting devices (XERF, Density, Oligio Kiss), and selects between them according to which kind of ageing the face is actually showing. The clinic's stated approach is restraint: results that are not obviously treatments, and the judgement to do less where less is right.