If aesthetic surgery wants public trust, it has to publish its outcomes.

Ask a patient walking into a rhinoplasty consultation what the surgeon's revision rate is. Ask what percentage of last year's breast augmentations required a return to theatre. In almost every clinic in almost every country, the honest answer is that no one knows — and no one is required to say.

This is a category-wide failure, not a criticism of any individual clinic. Aesthetic surgery has grown into a multi-billion-euro consumer market on the back of glossy marketing and social-media before-and-afters, without ever accepting the disclosure norms that govern the rest of medicine.

The technology to fix this is trivial. Structured patient-reported outcome measures, digitally captured pre- and post-operatively, are already used at scale in oncology and orthopaedics. There is no clinical reason aesthetic surgery cannot do the same.

The absence is a commercial preference, not a clinical constraint. That preference has run its course.