To the UK Government and those shaping public health policy:

At what point did we decide that skin, the body’s largest, most visible organ, no longer belonged to national care?

We fund dental check-ups.
We screen for cancers.
We invite over-50s to heart health reviews.
But we do not check the skin.

There is no structured, preventive skin guidance.
No national check-ups.
No public messaging around barrier care or everyday skin health.
No roadmap from birth to old age.

Instead, skin has been quietly outsourced -
picked up by the private sector, absorbed by aesthetics,
and left to unregulated wellness trends and conflicting messages.

One of the clearest examples? Lesion care.
Once a medical concern, many lesions are now treated as cosmetic.
People are paying privately to have moles, skin tags, and other marks removed -
sometimes by medics, sometimes by non-medics,
often without any formal obligation to get them properly assessed first.

This isn’t just confusing for the public. It’s confusing for professionals too.

Other parts of the body - like teeth - have national systems in place to check if things are going well, even if access is uneven.
Skin doesn’t.
Unless something goes wrong, there is no check-up, no prevention, no guidance.
And like in mental health, private care often fills the silence - whether it’s affordable or not.

Because where there is no public responsibility,
commercial interest steps in.
And the result is what we have now: a patchwork of advice, services, and risks - without clear, national coordination.

It’s worth noting that much of the skin-related workforce - beauty therapists, electrologists, hairdressers, nail technicians, massage therapists, and even some non-medical aesthetics providers, falls under the personal care sector, which is governed by the Department for Education.

These roles are trained through Ofqual-regulated qualifications. National Occupational Standards are set by HABIA. But there is no connection to the Department of Health and Social Care, and crucially, none of these services are delivered or supported by the NHS.

So while these qualifications are government-recognised, the actual services and education are entirely privately delivered, with no expectation for public health-aligned CPD, and no updates when national skin-related health guidance changes - if it exists at all.

The result is that skin care has been quietly pushed into a parallel system:

• Recognised in education,

• Deregulated in practice,

• Commercially driven in messaging,

• And publicly invisible unless something goes wrong.

And this matters - because all of those roles touch skin. Some daily. Some deeply. And they often serve as the first, and sometimes only, point of contact for people concerned about their skin.

But without national guidance, updates, or public oversight, they’re left to navigate alone.

So yes - this is what privatised skin looks like.
And no, it’s not safe, fair, or sustainable.

The Skin Well™ quietly asks:
If skin is a vital organ - and one that millions of professionals work with every day -
why isn’t it included in national health frameworks?
Why isn’t it protected, monitored, or publicly guided?

And if we didn’t mean to privatise skin…
isn’t it time we brought it back?

Respectfully,
The Skin Well™

May 2025

Related Read: ‘224,000 Reasons for Regulation’ - Quiet Case for Statutory Oversight of Skin Work in the UK

📚 Connected Scenario(s):

• Scenario Zero: Naming Skin in Public Health

• Scenario Three: Policy at Every Level

• Scenario Five: 224,000 Reasons for Regulation