Derm geekery...

...when is a derm not a derm? Quite a lot of the time actually, here's how to figure it out. Plus I rediscover Dermalogica, dig into why it fell off my radar & confess my misuse of its cult product...

May 13, 2026

Oooooof I was a bit wary about publishing this week’s — for the first time ever I asked people to have a look at it before I hit send. Partly I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t going to inadvertently offend people I really like and respect, but also I wanted to make sure I wasn’t in sketchy legal territory. (And here is where, for all the freedom that having my own newsletter gives me, I really miss the wisdom of a sub who’s been doing this for years and the legal protection of a massive publishing company.) Anyway, they both said publish it so here we are… dodgy derms and rediscovering Derm-alogica (no, I know they don’t actually write it like that but it fitted with the title.)

BTW: some of the links in this newsletter are affiliate links which means if you buy a product through them, I can earn a small amount of commission. This will never influence my opinion on something: I only rave about products I really rate. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone (and, for more on my thoughts on affiliate links, click here.)

Dermwashing

Greenwashing came first — brands trying to make out that they were more eco-friendly than they actually were. Then a few weeks ago I banged on about Spacewashing — or brands trying to make out that their products were wildly scientifically advance by invoking associations with NASA. Now, I want to talk about dermwashing — or medics sort of kind of letting people assume that they’re dermatologists, without ACTUALLY saying as much, when they’re not.

Let’s be clear, I’m UK-based and I’m talking about the UK system, not the US one (so apologies US readers as I’m not really au fait on how it works over there. I mean, I know you have board-certified, but I don’t know if you have the same issue with individuals intimating that they have credentials that they don’t.)
Here in the UK, you normally start by doing an undergraduate degree in medicine (4-6 years) before moving onto your foundation training — two years where you do rotations which are (usually) four-month stints in a range of specialities including general medicine and surgery, but they might also include dermatology, cardiology, obs and gynae, psychiatry etc etc. Then, after those two years you choose the route you want to go down — you might go into anaesthetics, general practice, or any one of the rotations that you did in your foundation years — if you want to be a dermatologist, you have to do another two years of Internal Medicine Training and pass exams to become a member of the Royal College of Physicians (MRCP).

doctor holding red stethoscope — White coat? Stethoscope? Must be a doctor. (Stock photos of dermatologists are thin on the ground…) Photo by Online Marketing on Unsplash

After that you have to get a training post. The number of training posts available in dermatology in 2025 was 57. To put that into context, there were 105 for clinical oncology, 161 for general surgery, and 181 for intensive care medicine1. Once you’ve got a post that’s another four years of training as a Dermatology Specialty Registrar, then you’ve got to pass an exam showing you have in-depth knowledge of thousands of skin conditions, and only then can you become an accredited dermatologist and apply for a consultant dermatologist positions.

Phew. That might explain why there are only around 600 people in the UK who are on the General Medical Council (GMC)’s Specialist Register for dermatology and who can officially call themselves “consultant dermatologists.” Surprised? I don’t blame you because while “consultant dermatologist” is a legally protected title meaning that unless you’ve gone through all of the hard yards above, you can’t call yourself a “consultant dermatologist” without someone coming after you, unfortunately other titles AREN’T protected in the same way. That means literally ANYONE can call themselves “cosmetic dermatologist”, “dermatologist”, “skin doctor”, “aesthetic doctor”, “hair doctor”, “trichologist”, etc. I KNOW!

But a lot of people don’t. Last year, in a bid to tackle this issue — and it is an issue — the British Association of Dermatologists introduced the Consultant Dermatologist Tick, which is a logo with their GMC number on it that shows that the doctor has completed ALL of this training. It looks like this:

This badge above is Dr Ellie Rashid’s and that’s her GMC number. If you look it up on the GMC register, it shows you everything — her full name, when and where she qualified and crucially, that she’s on the Specialist Register for Dermatology…

So why am I telling you all this? Because a lot of people you think are trained dermatologists are not.

That doesn’t mean that they’re bad people, or not good at their jobs. There are some brilliant people in the industry whose knowledge I depend upon, and who I 100% trust with my face, who are not consultant dermatologists and often for very good reason.

I knew Dr Sam Bunting of Dr Sam’s Skincare early on in her career and while she had been working in dermatology within the NHS, she was frustrated that there were areas of dermatology that she was interested in (such as ageing skin) that, understandably, she couldn’t study within the NHS and so she left and started working privately. Dr Beibei Du-Harpur isn’t a consultant dermatologist but she’s a lecturer at the St John’s Institute of Dermatology and is on the register as a trainee in dermatology (and has been for 10 years because she’s doing dual academic training, and she will actually be a consultant dermatologist by the end of this month.) Dr Wassim Taktouk isn’t on the specialist register for dermatology (although he is on the GP register) and did a lot of his medical training in A&E, which might explain why he’s such a calming presence to be around and if I ask him a derm-type question he will very often ask me to talk to Prof Firas Al-Niami (who is a consultant derm.) Sonia Khorana isn’t a dermatologist but I value her thoughts on skin, partly because the first time I asked her for quotes she referenced every single one with a peer-reviewed paper (😍) but also because when I first met her she was a GP with a Special Interest in Dermatology.

And that’s not just a GP who’s abstractly interested in skin, it means she’s done additional courses to get qualifications that prove she’s studied dermatology; I think these days the Special Interest in Dermatology qualification has been replaced by the terminology GP with an Extended Role in Dermatology (GPwER).

Brilliant medics all.

Sam, Bebibei, Wassim and Sonia — not consultant derms, still brilliant

I’m not gatekeeping any of this. Anyone — a brand, a PR, you — can go to the GMC website and search the register, it’s just a lot of people don’t bother. I’ve lost count of the number of times that a PR will tell me that they’ve signed up a dermatologist to front a new skincare campaign and I’ll have to tell them that they’re not actually a dermatologist. A few times when I’ve looked said “dermatologist” up on the GMC website, they have been on the Specialist Register… only for internal medicine, or cardiology. It seems a pity to have done all that training and not use it, but then I guess there’s more money, more sociable hours and more glitz and glamour in injecting Botox, writing private prescriptions for tretinoin, and fronting skincare brands. All totally legit. But they’re not consultant dermatologists.

Double checking people’s credentials is not a new thing for me. Maybe I’m cynical or mistrusting but it’s something I’ve done for as long as I can remember. Because when people misrepresent themselves, that tells me a lot about whether I should trust them. About 15 years ago I encountered a plastic surgeon who was launching their own skincare range. The PR (and the business card I was given) told me they were a member of a number of different associations. It didn’t take long to discover they weren’t. Maybe their membership had lapsed, maybe their PR had assumed that because they were on the NHS’ Specialist Register for plastic surgery, they were a member of a British plastic surgery association when they weren’t. But I’ve not had anything to do with them since. I’m just not going to give a platform to someone whose professional conduct isn’t unblemished. I just tried to find their name in one of the registers that they cite membership of on their current website and I couldn’t, so they clearly didn’t learn anything from that little episode. (Interestingly their brand is also one that — certainly in the past — would very much fall into the Spacewashing category.)

Botox injection being administered to a woman. — I’m kind of picky about who sticks toxins into me. Photo by Mina Rad on Unsplash

The year after that I discovered that when a High Street shop that shall remain nameless launched an in-house service offering Botox and fillers, the people injecting fillers were beauticians, not medically trained, and while they did have a medic into do the Botox, when I looked him up on the GMC’s register, it transpired he’d only graduated from medical school less than two years before and was still doing his rotations (not quite sure where he found the time but…) Again, at the time, all totally legal. But not who I’d want doing my Botox.

The reason that I’m talking about this now is because in the last week I kept on coming across someone on social media who I hadn’t seen before who is a doctor in the skincare space. I looked them up on the GMC website and discovered that while they’re a registered doctor, they’re not only not on the Specialist Register for Dermatology, they don’t currently have a licence to practise. According to the GMC:

“Some doctors hold registration without a licence. These doctors should not practise medicine in the UK, but chose to keep their registration to show that they are in good standing with us.”

Essentially if you have a registration but don’t have a licence to practise, you’re a doctor but you can’t legally treat patients or prescribe medication. Again, there may be a load of very good reasons for this but when I subsequently got an email from a PR offering this “NHS skin doctor” for quotes, it made me angry for everyone who a) is working in the NHS and b) has actually done all the work they needed to to be a dermatologist on the Specialist Register.

Loads of people will think I’m nitpicking. Loads of people will think this doesn’t matter. Although I hope the examples above explain why it does matter. Because it really matters to me. It matters because there is SO much bullshit in the beauty industry. And brands getting endorsement from medics is one way that they try to give themselves credibility and gravitas. But if you want a consultant dermatologist to give your brand credibility, hire a consultant dermatologist, do the 20 seconds of work it takes to check that the person you’re hiring is what they think they are. And, if you’re hiring someone who isn’t a consultant dermatologist, make sure you’re not misleading about this in your communications. Because — in this, as in everything, all I want to do is strip away the bullshit, look at the facts, and the science and the truth.

Rediscovering Dermalogica

I’ll be honest, while I ADORED Dermalogica in the noughties (if people wanted a really deep cleaning, degunking, not wildly expensive facial, Dermalogica was where I sent them, and I swore by some of their products — more on this later) but it has kind of fallen off my radar in recent years. I think it didn’t really help that they seemed to be launching a load of random serums that checked some fairly dubious (for me anyway) buzzwords like “collagen banking”, “exosomes” and “facial sculpting”.

Woman's face with cleansing foam during facial treatment. — Photo by kimia kazemi on Unsplash

However a few weeks ago I got invited to their immersive event that was celebrating the 25th anniversary of their Daily Microfoliant. I don’t know if you remember Daily Microfoliant, maybe you still use it, but it’s this white powder that’s a blend of colloidal oatmeal (super soothing), rice bran (also soothing and a bit brightening), papain (an enzymatic exfoliant found in papaya), and salicyclic acid (a BHA, gentle exfoliant, pore degunker), white tea (brightening) and liquorice (also brightening). It was kind of the grown up version of The Body Shop’s Japanese Washing Grains (RIP, but a 1990s staple that was, I think, ground rice and adzuki beans that you made into a paste and washed your face with.)

Anyway, it was revolutionary in being a product that had been designed to be gentle enough for daily exfoliation and yet still effective. Have a look at their befores and afters (independent clinical testing for four weeks), it’s not mind-blowing, but it’s also not nothing.

I’ve got to be honest and say that if you’ve already got a good skincare routine in place, I’m not convinced you’ll see significant changes but TBH, at the moment I’m all about the incremental gains and so after using it religiously for a while in the noughties / 2010s, I’ve added it back into my routine. And this time I’m using it properly.

Because, it turns out I was using it completely wrong — and chances are, if you’ve used it, so were you (I only say that because when we were told the right way to use it, literally every journalist / content creator there was flabbergasted.) So the way I — and most other people there — had been using it was to make it into a loose, gritty paste that we slathered over our faces. After all we were the generation raised on St Ives scrubs and Aapri, if it wasn’t gritty and scratchy, how could it POSSIBLY be doing any good?

But also, I’ll be honest, the instructions don’t exactly suggest anything drastically different: “Dispense about a half-teaspoon of Daily Microfoliant into very wet hands and create a creamy paste by rubbing hands together. Apply to face in circular motions, avoiding the eye area. Massage gently for one minute, then rinse thoroughly.” And yet at the event, we were shown how Dermalogica facialists are taught to use the Daily Microfoliant in a facial and it basically involves whipping it with a mask brush in a little bowl until you end up with something that’s more fluffly egg whites than creamy paste — and it’s that almost-not-gritty-at-all substance that you’re meant to massage into your face. (You can just do it in your hand, you don’t need a brush and bowl.)

What I was doing (L); what I should have been doing (R)

So yes, welcome back into my life Daily Microfoliant (from £19), now being used in the way you’re meant to be. But it also got me thinking about the other Dermalogica products that I used to swear by — there was the Precleanse (£49), which I now realise was Dermalogica talking double cleansing way before anyone else was. the Special Cleansing Gel (from £14), a really gentle foaming cleanser, their Barrier Repair (sadly discontinued), a silicone-based, oat-imbued barrier gel that I slathered on in ski season to protect and repair my skin, YEARS before the skin barrier became the topic du jour.

And having a look at their site again, it looks like they’re doing great things from a sustainability perspective. A number of their products are available in 500ml refills, which use — they say — 75% less plastic (also WAY cheaper, if you buy a 250ml cleanser it’s £42 or 16.8p/ml, if you buy a 500ml refill, it’s £59 or 11.8p/ml) but also, their 500ml pump bottles are monoplastic, meaning everything — including the pump, traditionally really tricky to recycle because they’re made of multiple different components, including metal — can be recycled as a single unit. I didn’t know any of this. Which means you probably didn’t either.

I’d be interested to know what you think because it feels like, like a lot of skincare brands to be honest, Dermalogica has got caught up in the race to be doing the new, new thing. Jumping onto trends rather than just sticking with what made them so great in the first place — they were the Gap of skincare, where you went for reliable basics (although admittedly those basics seem a lot pricier than they did 20 years ago, but doesn’t everything?) I don’t need Gap to be selling me cutting-edge trends and sequinned ballgowns, and I’m not sure I want Dermalogica to be trying to flog me their skincare equivalents… But, as ever, let me know what you think in the comments.

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