WORDS BY KANIZ ALI
Dr Lava Kadir is a dental surgeon turned facial aesthetics specialist, based London, Harley Street. With over a decade
of experience including time at the renowned Harley Street she has built her practice around holistic, medically evidence-based facial rejuvenation rather than trend-driven treatments.
Her approach favours enhancing what a patient already has over adding to it. She’s known for her selective use of dermal filler, reserving it mainly for corrective or medically necessary cases, and instead leans on techniques like medical grade HIFU, collagen-stimulating treatments, and skin bio-remodelling to lift, tighten and restore natural facial support.
Patients and colleagues alike point to her honesty as a defining trait she’s just as comfortable telling someone they don’t need a treatment as she is performing one.
There is a particular kind of compliment that Dr Lava has come to prize above all others one harder to earn than any remark about looking younger or any question about what she’s had done.
“You look incredible… but I can’t quite tell what’s changed,” she says, describing the response she values most from patients. For a clinician who has spent her career pursuing subtlety over spectacle, this is the whole point.
The philosophy did not begin in a lecture hall. “The biggest lesson of my career didn’t come from a textbook or a conference,” she reflects. “It came from my own reflection in the mirror.” It began, as these things so often do, in front of a mirror. Eleven years ago, newly a mother, Dr Lava noticed her jawline beginning to soften the first sign that her face was ageing. The obvious solution, the one reached for by so many women in her position, was dermal filler. “Dermal filler could easily have been my first choice,” she admits, “but I knew it wasn’t right for my face. I naturally have fuller facial features, and adding volume would only have made my face appear wider.” “I wanted lift, definition and tighter skin,” she says, “while still looking like myself.”
That search led her to medical grade High Intensity Focused Ultrasound, or HIFU a treatment that, over the following four months, reshaped her jawline, softened the beginnings of a double chin, and sharpened her contours so convincingly that friends assumed she had had filler. “My own collagen had simply been stimulated to rebuild, tighten and lift,” she says.
It is this distinction stimulation rather than addition that now sits at the centre of her clinical practice. Long before “biostimulation” became a term thrown around in glossy skincare marketing, Dr Lava had already built her approach around regenerative aesthetics: working with the body’s own biological machinery to restore firmness and support, rather than layering a mask over the signs of ageing.
“My approach has always been simple,” she explains. “Lift first, then reassess.” Many patients arrive at her clinic having already decided, often on the strength of a dramatic transformation seen on social media, that filler is the answer. Yet once tissue has been genuinely lifted and tightened, she finds that many of those same patients no longer want the volume they thought they needed. Others still choose filler, but require far less of it, and the results read as softer and more natural for it.
Filler still has a firm place in her practice. “In the right patient, with precise placement and a deep understanding of facial anatomy, it remains one of aesthetic medicine’s greatest advances,” she says. Aesthetic medicine, she insists, “is as much an art as it is a science, and knowing when not to inject is just as important as knowing how.”
The emphasis on “medical grade” is deliberate, and not a marketing flourish. “Not all HIFU technologies are created equally,” Dr Lava is quick to point out. Properly delivered, focused ultrasound energy reaches multiple depths of tissue, including the SMAS layer targeted ina surgical facelift, triggering a genuine repair response that continues to build collagen and elastin for up to four months. “My goal is always to lift and tighten while preserving the facial fat that supports youthful contours,” she says — with no needles, minimal discomfort, no downtime, and for most patients, just one treatment a year.
Dr Lava describes HIFU as “preparing the canvas.” As she puts it: “It activates the skin’s natural repair response, while regenerative treatments such as polynucleotides and exosomes complement those same regenerative processes, supporting skin quality as collagen and elastin continue to develop.”
What unites all of it is a single conviction, one she returns to again and again. “To me, that is the future of aesthetic medicine,” she says. “Preserving individuality.”
