Who is regulated, and who is not

Most non-surgical cosmetic treatment in Scotland is, as at 15th August 2026, unregulated. There is no register to be struck off, no minimum qualification, and for many procedures no licence of any kind. The Scottish Government’s own regulatory impact assessment puts it plainly: practitioners with a healthcare background are more regulated than those without.

The dividing line is the identity of the practitioner. Where a service is provided by a medical practitioner, a dental practitioner, a registered nurse, a registered midwife, a registered pharmacist, a registered pharmacy technician or a dental care professional, the premises are an independent clinic within the meaning of section 10F of the National Health Service (Scotland) Act 1978 and must be registered with Healthcare Improvement Scotland. Registered clinics are inspected, must meet standards, and have a complaints route that leads somewhere. Pharmacists and pharmacy technicians were added to that definition on 19th June 2024; before then a pharmacist-led clinic sat outside it.

Where the same injection or the same laser is used by somebody with no healthcare registration, none of that applies. The clinic is not an independent clinic, Healthcare Improvement Scotland has no jurisdiction over it, and there is no professional body to complain to.

There is one long-standing exception. Skin piercing and tattooing require a licence from the local authority under the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982 (Licensing of Skin Piercing and Tattooing) Order 2006, made under section 44 of the 1982 Act. Skin piercing is defined there to include acupuncture, cosmetic body piercing and electrolysis, and tattooing includes micropigmentation, which brings semi-permanent make-up within it. That licence is about premises, hygiene and the fitness of the operator. It says nothing about clinical competence, and it does not cover injectables, dermal fillers, most laser treatment, microneedling or chemical peels.

What changes, and when

The position has moved, and most pages on this subject have not caught up. The Non-surgical Procedures and Functions of Medical Reviewers (Scotland) Act 2026 received Royal Assent on 12th May 2026. Its long title describes an Act to prohibit the provision of non-surgical procedures to persons under the age of eighteen or to any person outwith certain specified premises, and to give the Scottish Ministers power to impose further restrictions. Section 2 creates the offence of providing a non-surgical procedure to a person under eighteen. Section 3 creates the offence of providing one outwith permitted premises.

Alongside it, the Scottish Ministers have laid a draft Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982 (Licensing of Non-surgical Procedures) Order 2026, which would require a local authority licence for a list of lower-risk procedures including microneedling, chemical peels, cryotherapy, cryolipolysis, electrocautery, high intensity focused ultrasound, radio frequency treatments and non-ablative laser and light treatment. Procedures carried out by registered healthcare professionals and in health service or registered independent healthcare premises are exempt from that licensing scheme, because they are already regulated elsewhere.

Botulinum toxin, fillers and who may lawfully do what

Botulinum toxin, sold under brand names including Botox, is a prescription only medicine. Under regulation 214 of the Human Medicines Regulations 2012 it may be sold or supplied only in accordance with a prescription given by an appropriate practitioner, and the appropriate practitioners are doctors, dentists, and those nurses, pharmacists, optometrists and supplementary prescribers who hold prescribing qualifications. A beauty therapist cannot lawfully prescribe it. There is a second restriction that is often missed. Regulation 214(2) provides that a person may not parenterally administer a prescription only medicine to another unless that person is an appropriate practitioner or is acting in accordance with the directions of one. An injection of botulinum toxin given by somebody who is neither a prescriber nor acting on a prescriber’s directions is therefore unlawful, quite apart from any question of negligence. What the legislation does not do is require the injector to hold any clinical qualification of his or her own, provided a prescriber has directed the treatment for a named patient.

The prescriber’s own professional rules fill part of that gap. The General Medical Council’s guidance on cosmetic interventions states at paragraph 11 that a doctor must carry out a physical examination of patients before prescribing injectable cosmetic medicines and must not therefore prescribe these medicines by telephone, video link, online or at the request of others for patients the doctor has not examined. A prescription written for a person the prescriber has never met is a breach of that guidance, and where such a prescription is followed by injury it is evidence that matters.

Dermal fillers are in a different position again. They are not prescription only medicines, so no prescription is required and, at present, no Scottish law restricts who may inject them. That is the single most surprising fact about this industry and it explains a great deal about the injuries that follow.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency issued a Drug Safety Update on 15th July 2026 warning about iatrogenic botulism, that is botulism caused by a therapeutic or cosmetic procedure, whose symptoms may take up to four weeks to appear and can include difficulty in swallowing and breathing. It warns that buying botulinum toxins from illegal suppliers significantly increases the risk of obtaining a falsified product or one not licensed for use in the United Kingdom. If you have been treated and are becoming unwell weeks later, that delay is recognised and it does not mean the treatment was unrelated.

Which claim do you actually have?

Usually two at once, and it is worth understanding both because they behave differently.

Negligence. A person who holds himself or herself out as competent to perform a treatment owes a duty to exercise the care and skill reasonably to be expected of a competent practitioner of that kind. Lack of training is not a defence. Somebody who advertises laser hair removal is judged by the standard of a person competent to carry out laser hair removal, not by the standard of the weekend course actually attended.

Contract. You paid for a service, so section 49 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 treats the contract as including a term that the trader must perform the service with reasonable care and skill. The remedies are set out in section 54: a right to repeat performance under section 55, a right to a price reduction under section 56, and, by section 54(7), a preserved right to claim damages in addition, provided you do not recover twice for the same loss. Repeat performance is plainly not what anybody wants after a burn, so in practice the contractual claim matters for the refund and the damages claim carries the injury. Where a product is supplied as part of the treatment, such as a filler that is injected, the contract is what the Act calls a mixed contract under section 1(4) to (6), and the goods terms apply as well, including the requirement of satisfactory quality in section 9.

Consent, where the practitioner is a clinician. If the person treating you was a doctor, dentist, nurse or other registered healthcare professional, a further duty applies. In Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board [2015] UKSC 11, an appeal from Scotland decided on 11th March 2015, the Supreme Court held at paragraph 87 that a doctor is under a duty to take reasonable care to ensure that the patient is aware of any material risks involved in any recommended treatment, and of any reasonable alternative or variant treatments. A risk is material where a reasonable person in the patient’s position would be likely to attach significance to it, or where the practitioner should reasonably be aware that this particular patient would. A consent form signed at the door, listing nothing, does not discharge that duty. Where the practitioner is not a clinician, the same ground is covered less directly, through the ordinary duty to warn and through what was represented before the money changed hands.

This is not clinical negligence in the usual sense, and it should not be confused with it. A claim about NHS or private medical treatment is dealt with on claiming for medical negligence. The distinction matters because the identity and insurance position of the defender is completely different.

How long you have, and why two periods are often quoted

Two different rules are frequently confused, and the confusion can cost a claim.

If what you are claiming includes damages for personal injury, section 17 of the Prescription and Limitation (Scotland) Act 1973 applies and the period is three years. Section 17(1) applies the section to an action of damages where the damages claimed consist of or include damages in respect of personal injuries, so it does not matter that you are also suing on the contract. Paragraph 2(g) of Schedule 1 to the same Act removes obligations to make reparation for personal injuries from the five-year prescription altogether. A claim framed in contract that includes an injury is therefore a three-year claim, not a five-year one.

The five-year prescription in section 6 applies to the purely financial side: the price you paid, the cost of corrective treatment already incurred, and other economic loss where no personal injury is claimed. If all you want is your money back for a treatment that did no physical harm, five years is the period.

The three years run from the date of the injury or, where later, from the date on which you first became aware or could reasonably have become aware that the injury was serious enough to justify an action, that it was attributable to an act or omission, and who was responsible. That second limb does real work here, because scarring, granulomas, vascular damage and nerve injury from injectables can take months to declare themselves and are often blamed on the patient before they are correctly attributed.

The hard part: who do you sue, and can they pay?

This is the most useful thing this page can tell you, and it is the thing the advertising never mentions. Having a good claim and being compensated are two different achievements.

An employer must insure against injury to employees, and a motorist must insure against injury to others. There is no equivalent obligation on a person who injects a stranger’s face. Professional indemnity insurance is a condition of registration for doctors, nurses, dentists and pharmacists, so where the practitioner holds one of those registrations there will almost always be a policy behind the claim. Where the practitioner holds no registration, insurance is voluntary. Many carry it. Many do not, and some who believe they do are uninsured in fact, because the policy was written on the basis of qualifications they do not hold or excluded the procedure they performed.

So the first question a solicitor will ask is not about the injury. It is who, precisely, you contracted with. Look at the card statement rather than the shop front, because the trading name on the window is often not the legal entity that took your money. If it is a limited company, its number and its filed accounts are public. If it is a sole trader, the claim is against that individual personally and is worth what that individual is worth. If the company has since been dissolved, that is not necessarily the end: a person with a potential claim for damages for personal injury may apply to the court at any time under section 1030 of the Companies Act 2006 to have the company restored to the register, and once restored its insurance is available.

Where the treatment was given in a clinic registered with Healthcare Improvement Scotland, there is also a regulator to complain to, and where the practitioner is a registered healthcare professional there is a professional body that can act on fitness to practise. Neither of those routes produces compensation, and neither is a substitute for a claim, but both produce findings and documents, and both are free.

Where the practitioner is uninsured and has nothing, an honest solicitor will tell you early that the claim is not economically worth pursuing. That is a hard conversation and it is better had in the first week than the second year. Funding matters here too: this is exactly the kind of case where the answer to what happens if you lose and how no win, no fee actually works should be settled before anything is raised.

What to do now

Photograph the injury properly, in daylight, from the same angle, every day for the first fortnight, because the change over time is often the strongest evidence of severity. Ask in writing for the product name, the brand and the batch number, and for a copy of everything you signed, including the consent form and any medical questionnaire. Keep the appointment messages, the advertising and the price list, because what was promised is part of the contract. Get the injury seen by a general practitioner, a pharmacist or an accident and emergency department, so that it exists on a medical record with a date on it rather than only in photographs.

Find out who you actually paid. Then, before you accept an offer of free corrective treatment from the person who caused the damage, take advice, because such offers are sometimes made in exchange for a signature that ends the claim. There is broader guidance on how injury claims work and what they are worth on claiming for an injury in Scotland and how much compensation you might receive.

Sources

• Non-surgical Procedures and Functions of Medical Reviewers (Scotland) Act 2026, legislation.gov.uk
• National Health Service (Scotland) Act 1978, section 10F, legislation.gov.uk
• Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982 (Licensing of Skin Piercing and Tattooing) Order 2006, legislation.gov.uk
• Licensing and further regulation of non-surgical procedures: business and regulatory impact assessment, Scottish Government
• Human Medicines Regulations 2012, regulation 214, legislation.gov.uk
• Cosmetic interventions: safety and quality, General Medical Council
• Botulinum toxin type A products: updated warnings regarding risk of iatrogenic botulism, Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency
• Consumer Rights Act 2015, section 49, legislation.gov.uk
• Prescription and Limitation (Scotland) Act 1973, section 17, legislation.gov.uk

This page is general information about the law of Scotland and is not advice on your own circumstances. The regulatory position is changing and the dates given are correct as at 15th August 2026. Time limits are strict and a missed one cannot be undone. Take advice on your own case.