Why some nurses are becoming cosmetic injectors. - Slate

Call it the aesthetic brain drain: While some students are enrolling with the express goal of working in beauty, based on my conversations with those in the field it seems the majority of aesthetic nurses are fleeing from emergency medicine, bedside nursing, and related work.

For these nurses, aesthetics offers something other fields can’t. “I saw a lot of autonomy in it and I saw a lot of growth in it,” Gedjeyan says. The average full-time salary for an RN in medical aesthetics is about $80,000 a year, on par with RNs in other fields.

But aesthetics is seen as more flexible than other nursing roles. “You have some really big deal injectors doing tons and tons of injections, working their butts off, and earning their money,” says Caroline Barnes, an RN who transitioned from emergency medicine to aesthetic nursing in 2017.

While her current employer doesn’t allow her to disclose her salary, Gedjeyan says she is doing just fine—while working three eight-hour days per week. “I just knew that if I did well, the money would take care of itself, and the money sure enough did,” she says.

For the nurses I spoke to, aesthetics also offers a sense of autonomy—a key factor in preventing and healing from burnout.

For artistic individuals, injecting can feel like a creative outlet. “A lot of people think aesthetics is looking fake or even looking very plasticy, but I think with our training now, aesthetics is just meant to enhance your natural beauty,” says Sabrina Pham, an eyelash tech-turned-RN. For entrepreneurial people, medical aesthetics offers a chance to promote their work through social media, build up a client list, and even open up their own med spa.

Before moving full-time into medical aesthetics, she developed her skills by working part-time in the ER and part-time in a med spa setting.

The benefits of having a nurse do your injections (or hair lasers, or IV bags) versus an unregulated operator, or even a cosmetic surgeon who spends all day in the operating room, is that these treatments are an aesthetics nurse’s singular focus. “There’s a very large value to be said of, this is all that I do, all the day long,” Barnes says.

As George Baxter-Holder, an aesthetic nurse with Skin Spirit, puts it: “The most important part of medical aesthetics is the fact that it’s medical.”.