Meet the Editor
This site began as a spreadsheet, and in most respects it still is one.
I keep books for a living, the unglamorous kind: receipts, reconciliations, month-end close. A friend was trying to choose between two quotes and couldn't work out why they were so far apart, so I did what I'd do with any two invoices and put them on the same ledger. Columns for the product, the amount, the number of sessions, whether a follow-up was included, and how long the thing was expected to hold. Once the quotes were in the same units the gap between them mostly evaporated, and what was left was a difference in how two businesses charge rather than a difference in what she'd be getting.
She sent it to someone else. That person asked for one for a different treatment. A few years on, the columns haven't changed much and the spreadsheet has become a website.
What this site holds to
Treatments get compared. Businesses don't. I put Botox next to Dysport, filler next to biostimulator, needling next to the version with energy in it. I won't put one practice next to another and tell you which is better, because I'd be inventing a verdict I have no standing to reach. The comparison pages here are about products and approaches. Every one of them.
Same units or no comparison. Nothing gets compared until both sides are measured the same way. That rule sounds pedantic and it is the single most useful thing on this site.
Ranges, not figures. Where the honest answer spans months, you'll get months. I'd rather be vague and right than precise and made up.
Nothing invented. No prices. No figures I can't source. No before-and-afters, and no reviews of anybody. If I don't know, the page says so, and it says so more often than you might expect.
No promises about your face. I can tell you how a treatment works and what it typically costs to maintain. I can't tell you what it'll do for you, and neither can anyone who hasn't examined you.
Who's writing
A bookkeeper from Union City, writing on her own time. Not a committee, not a content team, and not a clinic.
My working day is invoices and matching what was charged against what was agreed, and none of it touches medicine. Read these pages the way you'd read a colleague's cost breakdown: useful for the numbers, no substitute for medical advice from someone who has examined you. The arithmetic and the small print turn out to cover most of what stops people deciding, and that part I can do.
I keep my own name off the site, and not for anything interesting. This is a side project rather than a business, and putting a byline on it would invite people to weigh my opinion rather than check my method. The method is the part I'd like you to check. If something here has gone stale or was wrong to begin with, send it to me. A correction costs me ten minutes; leaving it up costs somebody else a lot more.
No practice pays me. Nobody has ever been given coverage in exchange for anything, and if that changes it will say so on the page rather than in a footnote.
Writing this from up on the hill
I live a few blocks off Bergenline, which shapes the site more than you'd think.
Most of us here are already choosing across several towns rather than one high street, so comparison isn't an abstraction. It's Tuesday. The elevator down to the light rail makes the bottom of the county genuinely reachable, which widens the field of practices worth quoting, which is exactly the condition under which comparing quotes starts to pay. Hoboken is the obvious case, with a med spa close to Union City sitting down there, a ride on the light rail rather than an expedition.
The other local habit built into these pages is checking that a business is real and reachable before travelling to it. Member listings kept by groups like the Home - Hudson County Chamber of Commerce and the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce settle that narrow question and nothing beyond it. And a fair number of the budget pages here started life answering questions from people studying at Hudson County Community College, where the annual figure isn't a preference, it's a hard ceiling.
What I'd like you to do with it
Pick the page that matches whatever's blocking you. Copy the questions off it. Take them to two consultations, get both quotes itemised over the full course, and do the division yourself.
Then decide. I'd rather you leave this site with a better spreadsheet than with my opinion, because you're the one who has to live with the appointment.