The Ugly Business of Beauty
Three years of reporting. A 15+ billion dollar industry. The victims left to pick up the pieces.
The Investigation
More than three years ago, we began looking into the too-good-to-be-true earnings of a single device maker.
That was the first red flag — much of the industry’s business model relied on outrageous financing schemes and selling products to customers with little use for them.
But then we started speaking to customers, and everything changed.
Unmistakably, the medical aesthetics industry’s growth has been a binary proposition: If you work at a device maker, the customer base has exploded, revenue and profits skyrocketed, and many executives and sales staff have become wealthy.
A multi-billion-dollar industry doesn’t get built by accident, and it doesn’t stay hidden by accident either. This is not a story about a few bad actors or unlucky outcomes. It’s a story about where the business model came from. It started small: a handful of manufacturers willing to cut corners, pressure their own employees, and sell devices they knew could hurt people, because it worked and nobody stopped them. Their culture became the industry’s culture. What began with a few companies now runs through hundreds of manufacturers, med spas, and sales floors, all running the same playbook, including, as we’ve already begun to document, the perpetuation of grotesque levels of sexual harassment.
This is not going away. The device side of this market alone was worth between fifteen and twenty billion dollars in 2025, and industry researchers project it could nearly double again within the decade.
If the industry grows at these rates, it stands to reason that the abuse our reporting has identified will scale with them. That is, a lot more people are going to get hurt.
Nick Verbitsky and Roddy Boyd lead this investigation. Between them, they have more than fifty years of experience exposing the worst of corporate and criminal misconduct, from the pharmaceutical industry’s contribution to the opioid epidemic, to Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. Nothing in that combined half century of work has shocked them the way this industry has.
We’ve spent three years gathering the interviews, lawsuits, and settlements this industry hoped would stay sealed. The Ugly Business of Beauty is a documentary series built entirely on that reporting. No one has ever told a full accounting of what this industry has done to the people it treated and the people it employed in one place.
We’ve already begun publishing this reporting. Here is a sample two-part investigation of the sexual harassment we uncovered in one company.
- A saleswoman says a district sales manager grabbed her in a hotel bar in front of colleagues — then brushed off her anger, saying he was only joking.
- Colleagues privately called one top manager “an asshole and misogynist.” He kept his job anyway.
- Former staff described the sales unit as “a boys’ club,” where a group chat turned patient photos and coworkers’ bodies into running jokes that managers never stopped.
But the precise, document- and interview-driven reporting we do takes both time and money we don’t yet have. A feature documentary requires a large amount of capital, and we are choosing not to raise it the way this industry raises money: through traditional financing channels, studios beholden to advertisers, or large investors with a stake in staying friendly with the companies we’re investigating. We want this documentary funded by the people who lived it: the patients, the practitioners, the employees, and everyone who values truth above revenues.
A $1,000 (tax-deductible) gift and a $100,000 gift do the same job here. They buy reporters’ time to keep digging until the full picture is public.
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Every gift funds the reporting behind The Ugly Business of Beauty, made through PayPal at the Foundation for Financial Journalism.
The Victims
We have built an archive of interviews with women and providers who all told a variation of the same stories: A treatment marketed on Instagram as safe, fast, and life-changing too often left them injured, in pain, angry, scared, and ashamed. A device sold as safe and effective, training that left them unable to care for patients, and financing that left them financially and reputationally ruined.
Some digging uncovered FDA warnings ignored, and devices marketed as non-invasive and riskless that were often the opposite. Both versions of their stories are ultimately caused by the corporate practices of the manufacturers, and the downstream effects are devastating.
The volume of people reporting burns, scars, and being duped into financial stress cannot be ignored. Nor are these problems short-term: Some of those injuries are tragically intimate and permanent, forcing brutal changes in how women experience life. Similarly, promising or even profitable healthcare providers and small business owners have been ruined, and forced to downsize or even close.
If you’ve been touched by this industry, as a patient, a practitioner, a sales rep, or a former employee, we want your story too. Every account we can corroborate makes the next one easier to tell, gives our reporters and producers more to work with, and makes it that much harder for this industry to keep operating the way it has for decades. Your story will be held in the highest confidence, and your name will not be used without your permission. If you’d like more information on how we protect confidentiality, please reach out.
Were you hurt by this industry, or did you watch it happen from the inside?
Patients. Practitioners. Med spa owners and staff. Manufacturer employees. Abused Sales reps. If you lived any part of this, we want to hear it. Every account is confidential, and we never publish your name without your permission.
Donate what you can. Donate your story. Both move this forward.
The Team
Producer / Director
Nick Verbitsky has been producing/directing documentary films for twenty years, with much of that time spent working on behalf of FRONTLINE, public television’s award-winning investigative film series.
Credits include To Catch a Trader, an Emmy-nominated investigative look at Wall Street insider trading; Emmy-winning Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, which also received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature; and has also produced/co-produced films like Weinstein, Documenting Hate (Emmy winner), as well as Opioids, Inc.
Verbitsky has won two national Emmy Awards, a DuPont-Columbia Silver Baton Award for Excellence in Journalism, and a Loeb Award for Best Documentary Film.
Currently, he is working on a CNN project about the fallen cryptocurrency magnate Sam Bankman-Fried.
Founder, Foundation for Financial Journalism
Roddy Boyd has been using investigative journalism to promote corporate accountability for 25 years.
Boyd’s career path has included Institutional Investor News, The New York Sun, the New York Post’s business desk, and Fortune Magazine. In 2011, he wrote Fatal Risk, a book about AIG’s collapse during the global financial crisis, which was on “The Long List” (top 16) of the year’s business books.
Most recently, between 2011 and 2021, Boyd founded and ran the Foundation for Financial Journalism, a non-profit journalism organization. Notably, FFJ’s focus on long-form, complex investigations into large companies exposed executive conduct that, in several cases, helped lead to regulatory and enforcement action.
For example, FFJ’s articles on Valeant Pharmaceuticals International and Insys Therapeutics first flagged issues that became the centerpiece of the Department of Justice’s indictments against executives. The DOJ obtained convictions in both cases, and several executives were sentenced to prison.
Other examples where Boyd’s reporting helped move the narrative on high-flying companies: Wirecard in 2018-2019, Freedom Holding in 2020 and 2021, Penumbra in 2020, Corcept Therapeutics in 2019, the Canadian financier Newton Glassman’s investment funds in 2018, Synchronoss Technologies in 2017, the Karfunkel Brothers, the founders of AmTrust Financial Services, between 2014-2016, former hedge fund manager Bryan Caisse in 2013-14, Ponzi scammer Anthony Davian in 2013-14, and in 2012, the multi-level marketing unit embedded in Blyth.
His reporting on Insys was the basis for Frontline’s award-winning Opioids Inc. Similarly, Netflix’s Dirty Money documentary series made his Valeant reporting the center of their The Drug Short episode.
Boyd was also a reporter for ABC News investigative reporting team’s award-winning podcast on Jeffrey Epstein, “Truth and Lies.”
Executive Producer
Story Producer
Support this investigation
A $1 gift and a $100,000 gift do the same job: they buy time for reporters to keep digging until the full picture is public.
- $25 helps cover a public records request
- $100 funds an hour of interview transcription and legal review
- $500 supports a day of on-the-ground reporting
- $1,000+ funds a full interview trip to corroborate a new account
Wire / ACH available upon request.
All gifts are tax-deductible under IRS rule 501(c)(3), made through the Foundation for Financial Journalism.
Editorial independence is guaranteed: donors have no say in what we report, who we report on, or when this project is released. Read our full Donor Policy
This is a grassroots reckoning, funded and fueled by the people this industry was built on.