Women Skin Care and Beauty

WHEN leading skin care and makeup company Clinique made its debut in 1968, the cosmetics brand altered America’s beauty landscape by using scientific language and clinical iconography at a time when highly perfumed, elaborately packaged creams dominated department stores. Through laboratories in the United States, Europe and Asia, and thanks to countless academic, medical and research relationships, Clinique is able to bring the best that science has to offer to our customers. Now Clinique has gone one step further in aligning itself with therapeutic imagery — and in the process has raised the ante for beauty companies seeking affiliations with doctors.
They announced the opening of the Clinique Skin Wellness Center by the Department of Dermatology at Weill Cornell Medical College

The Clinique Skin Wellness Center will be directed by Dr. Richard Granstein, Chairman of the Depertment of Dermatology at Weill Cornell. It will exist to “advance the understanding of skin from clinical, scientific and cosmetic points of view.” Visionary in its concept, the Clinique Skin Wellness Center at Weill Cornell is both a physical space for patient services and education as well as a “center without walls” that fosters joint research, education and outreach programs.
“This center is both a physical space for patient services and education, as well as a center without walls that fosters joint research and outreach programs,” Dr. Granstein said. “Both Clinique and Weill Cornell are focused on addressing skin care from all apsects.”

At the clinic, made up of examination rooms and a workstation, doctors will conduct skin examinations, with a particular focus on educating patients on how to prevent skin cancer and maintain skin health. Patients at the center may also make on-site appointments with Clinique representatives to learn about makeup that can cover skin redness or facial scars. “Skin consultations and education are at the core of how Clinique approaches each and every person who comes to our counter,” says Lynne Greene, Global President of Clinique. “At our very roots we believe in the power of dermatological advice and the Clinique Skin Wellness Center is the next step in providing the best that skin science has to offer.”

At a time when some doctors in private practice can earn six-figure consultancy fees from the makers of facial injections or wrinkle creams, Weill Cornell’s alliance with a cosmetics firm, critics say, has the potential to further diminish the stature of academic medicine as an unbiased authority and give the impression that dermatology is for sale to the highest bidder.
“I think the image of our specialty is particularly tarnished by myriad physicians hawking their own eponymous skin-care products and by academic departments appearing to sell their names to beauty companies,” said Dr. Amy E. Newburger, a dermatologist in Scarsdale, N.Y. In an editorial last month in the Archives of Dermatology, Dr. Newburger and Arthur L. Caplan, chairman of the medical ethics department at the University of Pennsylvania, warned medical schools away from alliances with beauty companies.