When influence becomes the new currency of expertise, who pays the price?
Shannon Synoracki, PA-C, built her Northern Virginia practice with a clear mission: to provide honest, authentic care in an industry that often felt like a “popularity contest.” As the founder of Prejuvenation Aesthetics, she had witnessed firsthand how patients were “treated as numbers” and “sold things they didn’t need” in other practices. When she opened her doors in 2021, she was determined to do things differently—to focus on genuine patient outcomes rather than social media metrics.
But as her practice grew, Shannon found herself caught in an unexpected tension. Despite building a successful business grounded in clinical excellence and patient satisfaction, she watched as providers with “average clinical skills but 100K followers” received speaking opportunities, brand partnerships, and industry recognition. The very authenticity that drove her clinical success seemed to work against her in the broader industry ecosystem.
“I think our industry in general has turned into a popularity contest,” Shannon reflected during a recent interview. “And I think we lose sight of why we got into aesthetics in the first place… it makes you question, you know, is this what it’s about? Is it about the money? Is it about trying to get the most followers or be popular?”
Shannon’s story illustrates a broader challenge facing our field: What happens when the currency of professional recognition shifts from clinical competence to digital influence?
The Influence-Expertise Problem
Are we witnessing an unprecedented oversaturation of “experts” coupled with an undersupply of genuine wisdom? It seems we’ve created an ecosystem where the loudest voices often carry the most weight, regardless of their depth of knowledge or track record of sustainable success. This isn’t just about social media noise, it represents a fundamental shift in how we define and distribute authority within our profession, with real consequences for practitioners trying to build authentic, lasting careers.
Consider this scenario: A provider with exceptional injection technique and modest social media presence sits next to someone with basic clinical acumen and 100K followers at an industry event. Who gets asked to speak? Who gets the brand partnerships? Who becomes the “go-to” expert for business advice?
We all know the answer.
This represents a dangerous conflation of influence with expertise:a phenomenon that extends far beyond our industry but has found particularly fertile ground in aesthetics. The visual nature of our work, combined with the industry’s relative youth and rapid growth, has created perfect conditions for this authority paradox to flourish.
The result? A generation of practitioners being taught to prioritize platform building over skill development, engagement rates over patient outcomes, and personal branding over professional growth.
The Hidden Cost of the Expert Economy
What we’re witnessing isn’t just market dynamics at play,it’s the emergence of what I call the “expert economy,” where expertise itself has become a commodity to be packaged, marketed, and sold.
In this economy:
- Speaking becomes more valuable than practicing
- Teaching becomes more profitable than treating
- Content creation takes precedence over continuing education
- Influence metrics matter more than clinical outcomes
This shift creates a perverse incentive structure where the most skilled practitioners may find themselves economically disadvantaged compared to those who excel at self-promotion. Worse, it encourages talented clinicians to abandon patient care for platform building, ultimately depleting the industry of its most valuable asset: genuine expertise.
The Authenticity Recession
Could we be living through what might be called an “authenticity recession” in aesthetics,a climate where genuine expertise is being systematically undervalued ?This recession manifests in several concerning ways. We see the same faces rotating through speaking circuits, teaching variations of the same content, while truly innovative practitioners remain in their treatment rooms serving patients. (Trust me when I tell you I see this parallel in business coaching).
High-priced educational programs proliferate, often led by individuals whose primary qualification is having previously sold high-priced educational programs. There’s been an explosion of certifications and credentials that serve more as marketing tools than genuine measures of competency. Meanwhile, content designed to appear insightful while saying nothing substantive fills the space where real education should exist. Perhaps this is just intellectual junk food that crowds out meaningful professional development.
What would it look like to fundamentally restructure how we evaluate and elevate expertise within our industry? Could we envision new frameworks for evaluating professional authority that weight longitudinal patient outcomes over social media metrics, peer recognition from practicing clinicians over follower counts, and innovation contributions over content volume?
What if we created alternative pathways to recognition;clinical excellence awards based on peer review rather than popularity, research grants for practicing clinicians, mentorship programs connecting emerging practitioners with working experts? How might we better educate practitioners to evaluate the experts they choose to learn from, developing frameworks for assessing educational offerings and identifying performative expertise?
Shannon’s response to these industry pressures offers one possible path forward. Rather than abandoning social media entirely, she hired help to manage her digital presence while retreating from the comparison trap that platforms often create. “I had to get off social media,” she explains. “I lost all motivation or desire to put my face out there and create content in an industry that I felt was very fake.”
Instead, she focused on what she calls “getting back to the basics”,simplifying her business, honing in on her most valuable patients, and strengthening her clinical foundation rather than expanding for expansion’s sake. “I’m just really trying to simplify as much as possible. What are the simple things that are going to drive my business, drive success, make me feel like the best version of myself?”
The Path Forward
The aesthetics industry stands at a crossroads. We can continue down the current path, where influence increasingly substitutes for expertise, or we can choose to rebuild our professional authority structures around genuine competence and patient outcomes.
Those with genuine expertise but limited platforms need structural support: content creation assistance for sharing knowledge without sacrificing clinical time, speaking opportunities that prioritize expertise over influence, and economic models that reward teaching without requiring full-time platform management.
Meanwhile, authentic experts bear some responsibility for the current state of affairs. By ceding the educational space to those more focused on marketing than mastery, they have inadvertently enabled the authority paradox. The solution requires them to find ways to share knowledge without abandoning clinical focus—through collaborative content creation, selective speaking engagements, mentorship relationships, and professional society leadership.
Building a Sustainable Expert Ecosystem
The goal isn’t to eliminate all marketing or platform building from the aesthetics industry, it’s to create a more balanced ecosystem where genuine expertise is appropriately valued and rewarded. This requires systematic changes: Professional organizations must establish standards that prioritize clinical excellence over marketing metrics. Training programs need to emphasize critical thinking skills that help practitioners evaluate continuing education sources. Each practitioner must take responsibility for choosing mentors and resources based on substance rather than style. And patients need better tools for evaluating provider qualifications beyond social media presence.
The choice we make will determine not only the careers of current practitioners but the future trajectory of the entire field. Will we become an industry known for substance or style? For depth or reach? For expertise or influence?
The practitioners who will thrive in the next phase of our industry’s evolution won’t necessarily be those with the largest platforms—they’ll be those who combine genuine expertise with the wisdom to share it authentically. They’ll be the ones who understand that true authority comes not from commanding attention, but from consistently delivering value.
The expert crisis in aesthetics isn’t just a problem to be solved—it’s an opportunity to rebuild our professional foundations on more solid ground. The question is: are we ready to take it?
What would genuine expertise look like in your corner of the aesthetics industry? How might we better identify and elevate the voices that matter most?
The choice between substance and style starts with the community you choose.
If you’re ready to build your practice around authentic expertise rather than influence metrics, join the Fierce Factor Society. We’re creating the alternative pathway to recognition that prioritizes clinical excellence, peer learning, and sustainable growth over platform building and popularity contests.