Why we can't quote you for something new
You have been in before. You send a message asking what something would cost. We reply saying we cannot tell you until you come in.
That is annoying. It also sounds exactly like what a clinic says when it wants you in the room so it can sell to you.
Here is the actual reason, and then the part where we admit what it costs us.
We publish every price we have
Start here, because it matters.
Every price we charge is on one page. No "from" figures, no quotes on request, no packages that only make sense once someone has explained them to you. If you want to know what a consultation costs, or a facial, it is published and it has been for as long as we have had a website.
So this is not price-hiding. When we say we cannot quote you, it is not the price we are withholding.
A quote is a recommendation wearing a number
This is the whole thing.
If we tell you what something would cost for you, we have told you something else at the same time: that it is a reasonable thing for you to have. The number carries a judgement inside it. You cannot separate them, and neither can we.
And we cannot make that judgement from a message. Not because we are being careful for the sake of it — because we genuinely do not know. We have not looked at your skin today. We do not know what it has been doing since we last saw you, what you have used in the meantime, what else has changed.
Answering the question you asked would mean answering a question you did not ask, and getting it wrong.
Then there is the law
Some of it is not our call.
For prescription-only treatments, Australian law is direct: they cannot be advertised to the public. Not named, not priced, not described in a way that promotes them. That applies to a message to one person as much as to a billboard.
There are also rules about how any of this can be assessed. A recommendation follows an examination — a real one, in person, by a practitioner who is registered and accountable for the answer. That is not a formality anyone can be talked out of, and a clinic that skips it is not being flexible with you. It is being unregulated with you.
What we can do
The line is more useful than it first sounds.
If you have been consulted for it before, we can talk about it. It was assessed, in person, and it was written down at the time. Picking that conversation back up is continuing something, and continuing something is fine.
If it is new, it needs a consultation. Not because a rule says so, but because nobody has looked at it — and that is true whether it is new to you or new to us.
Most of the time the honest answer to "can you quote me for this?" is "we can, once we've seen it." The consultation is not a gate in front of the answer. It is where the answer comes from.
What this costs us
We should be straight about this rather than pretending the policy is free.
People go elsewhere. Somebody messages three clinics, two of them send a price back within the hour, and we send back a paragraph about needing to see them first. We lose that booking most times it happens, and we know we do.
We have decided we would rather lose it than send a number that quietly says yes, that suits you about a face we have not looked at.
You are entitled to think that is overcautious. Plenty of people do, and they book elsewhere, and that is a legitimate choice. But you now know which kind of clinic you are dealing with — and if you have ever had a price come back in eleven minutes for something nobody had examined, you know what the other kind looks like.
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The short version
- Every price is published. This is not about the money.
- A quote is a recommendation with a number attached. We cannot make one from a message.
- Already consulted for? We can talk about it.
- New? It needs ninety minutes and someone looking at your skin.
- Yes, this loses us work. We have made our peace with it.