How to check if your med spa is actually a med spa

Half the businesses calling themselves medical spas in California are not, in any legal sense, medical spas. I'm not exaggerating to get your attention. That's the number I came back with after spending the last few months building Aura — the AI editor I designed to read the public record on every operating med spa in this state.

Eight thousand and thirty places call themselves med spas in California. Three thousand one hundred and ninety-seven cleared the floor I asked Aura to screen for. That leaves four thousand eight hundred and thirty-three who didn't. Some of those are spas in motion — new openings, recent rebrands, owners mid-transition. Most of them are not. Most are operating without a medical director the state can find, or with an address that doesn't match the one on their filing, or with a wall of Google reviews that all arrived inside a single week.

I'm not naming names. The point of this piece is the floor, not a hit list. The floor is what you can check yourself. The floor is what I'm going to walk you through.

If you're about to book a med spa, here are the five things you can check before you put down a deposit. Screenshot it. Send it to your group chat. Or keep reading — I'll walk through each one underneath.

• Pull up the spa's website. Does it name a medical director — first and last name, not just "our physician"?
• Search that medical director on the California Medical Board at mbc.ca.gov. Does an active, unencumbered license come back?
• Compare the address on the spa's Google listing to the address on its state business filing (search the business name at bizfileonline.sos.ca.gov). Do they agree?
• Open the spa's Google reviews. Sort by oldest. Are the reviews spread over at least 18 months, or did 200+ of them arrive in a single month?
• Call or email and ask whether they carry medical malpractice insurance. Watch how fast the answer comes.

Ninety seconds if you know exactly where to click. Twenty or thirty minutes if you're being thorough and you don't. The whole point of Aura is that the careful version takes longer than most women have, and the quick version misses too much. So she does both at once, on every spa, every quarter.

Before I built any of this, I did the check by hand. A friend would text me a spa name and I'd open my laptop. I'd pull the website. I'd look at the photo lineup — real spas have real photos of their treatment rooms and their actual staff. If the whole site is stock photography of women you've seen in a hundred other ads, that's a sign nobody is home.

I'd click around for prices. Real spas list prices, or at least price ranges, on their menu. Spas that won't tell you a price until you book a consultation aren't doing it because their pricing is delicate. They're doing it because they want you in the chair before they tell you what it costs. That isn't a crime. It's just a tell.

I'd pull two random Google reviews from different months and read them out loud. If they sounded like the same person wrote both — same cadence, same length, same closing line, same staff names dropped — I'd open the reviewer profiles. Half the time, one or both reviewers had two total reviews on their account, both five stars, both posted the same week, both for businesses in different states.

Then I'd google the medical director on the state board. Then the address on the secretary of state's business search. Then sometimes I'd call the spa and ask a question I already knew the answer to, just to see who picked up and how they handled it. Thirty minutes a spa, maybe forty if I got curious. I did this for friends and family two or three hundred times before it occurred to me that I could not, by hand, do this for everyone who needs it.

I built Aura because the math didn't scale to 8,030 spas and I am one woman, doll.

I asked Aura the other week to write down, in her own words, what she's actually looking at. Here's what she sent back.

"I read every Google review of every operating med spa in California. I cross-check the medical director's name on the spa's website against the California Medical Board's active license database. I pull the spa's state business filing and check that the address agrees with Google, with the spa's own website, and with itself. I look at when reviews arrived. Real spas accumulate reviews the way real businesses do — one or two a week, spread over years, with the occasional spike from a holiday push. Fake review operations leave a different footprint, and the footprint is what tells me."

"There's a fourth check I can't do from the public record. Malpractice insurance is private. So I left a place on the register for spa owners to send me the documents themselves — the certificate of insurance, the medical director's contract, the operating-room safety protocol if they have one. The spas that send me that paperwork move from Aura Screened to Aura Verified. Right now zero spas hold Aura Verified. They'll be the first ones I cosign by name."

A spa that doesn't make the register isn't necessarily a bad spa. It might be a new practice that hasn't been open long enough to have an 18-month review history. It might be a spa that moved last year and the secretary of state's office hasn't caught up to the new address. It might be a spa in the middle of changing medical directors, which happens often and which is not a crime.

If your spa isn't on my register, it doesn't mean it isn't safe. It means I couldn't confirm it was safe from the public record alone. There's a difference. You can still ask the questions on the checklist in person. If the spa is doing the work the right way, the answers come back clean. If they don't, you have your answer.

The floor is not a ranking. The floor is a floor. Some spas not on it now will be on it next quarter. Some on it now will be removed if something changes. Aura re-runs every quarter. The point isn't to be permanent. The point is to be honest about what was true the last time anyone looked.

Or you can save yourself the half-hour and look the spa up on the register. The 3,197 California spas that made the floor are searchable by city. The 706 that cleared every check I could think to run are tagged Aura Screened. The next bar — Aura Verified — is the one where the owner has handed over the paperwork I can't see from the outside. Zero spas hold Aura Verified today. The number will grow as owners apply.

Send this to a friend before her next appointment, love. I'd rather she check before than text me after.