Kathy Scott is a multi-award-winning holistic skin practitioner with qualifications in homeopathy, massage, reflexology, beauty and skin. She is passionate about protecting the integrity of holistic practice and championing results-driven, non-invasive approaches to skin rejuvenation. Here she shares her thoughts on what holistic means in the beauty industry today.
In beauty and wellness, “holistic” has become one of the most overused words in the room.
The problem is not that the term has become popular. In many ways, that reflects something positive. Clients are asking better questions. They want more than a quick fix. They are increasingly interested in sleep, stress, nutrition, hormones, nervous system health and long-term skin function, not just surface-level results.
That shift is welcome.
My concern is this: as the word “holistic” has become more marketable, it has also become more vague. It is now used to describe a huge range of services, businesses and treatment philosophies, many of which differ significantly in training, scope and depth of practice.
And when one word is used to describe wildly different approaches, the public loses clarity and practitioners lose distinction.
I say this as someone who identifies as a holistic skin practitioner. My background includes qualifications in homeopathy, massage, reflexology, beauty and skin. Over time, I arrived at that description because no single title seemed to capture the way I work. My practice is not purely beauty, and it is not purely complementary therapy either. It sits at the meeting point of both.
To me, holistic practice means far more than adding a few wellness questions into a consultation form. It means working with the whole person, not just the visible symptom. It means recognising that skin is influenced by far more than products and procedures. Lifestyle, stress, emotional wellbeing, nervous system regulation, habits, beliefs and daily rhythms all matter.
But for me, genuine holistic practice goes deeper than even that. It includes the physical, mental and emotional, of course, but it can also include the energetic and spiritual dimension of a person’s experience. I know those words may make some readers uncomfortable because they are harder to measure and do not sit neatly inside a conventional clinical model. But that does not make them irrelevant. For many fully trained holistic practitioners, this depth of connection is not an add-on or a marketing angle. It is part of the discipline itself.
Not every practitioner will work in that space, and not every client will want to. That is absolutely fine. But if we are going to use the word “holistic”, we should at least be honest that, at its deepest level, holistic practice has traditionally meant more than symptom management with a lifestyle gloss.
Over the past 18 months, I have been paying closer attention to how the word is being used across our industry. A few things have become increasingly clear.
- First, “holistic” is now being used to market services that would never previously have associated themselves with that term.
- Second, it no longer means the same thing from one business to the next.
- Third, it has become, in some cases, a buzzword — shorthand for “we care”, “we listen”, or “we look at lifestyle too”.
- And finally, holistic sells.
This is where the issue begins.
If a clinic describes itself as holistic because it asks about sleep, recommends supplements or discusses stress, is that a good thing? Yes, potentially. It may reflect a broader, more thoughtful consultation process. It may signal that the practitioner is trying to see the client in context rather than in isolation.
But is that enough to claim holistic practice in the fullest sense of the word? I am not convinced it is.
That is not a criticism of beauty therapists, aesthetic practitioners or clinic owners who are evolving their services in response to changing client demand. The industry should evolve. It should become more joined-up. It should become more respectful of the wider factors that influence skin health and wellbeing. But evolution should not come at the expense of clarity.
There is a real difference between being holistic-informed and being a qualified holistic practitioner. One may involve expanding your consultation style or broadening your understanding of lifestyle factors. The other is rooted in a deeper framework of training, philosophy, boundaries and way of being with a client. If we use the same word for both, we blur an important professional distinction. That matters for public understanding, but it also matters for standards.
A client reading the word “holistic” should have some idea of what to expect. At the moment, that is far from guaranteed. One practitioner may mean an integrative, whole-person approach grounded in years of complementary therapy training. Another may mean a more relaxed consultation style alongside a conventional treatment menu. Another may simply mean “natural”, “gentle” or “wellness-led”. These are not identical models of care, and pretending they are does nobody any favours.
There is another uncomfortable truth here too: the beauty and wellness industries are increasingly borrowing from the language of traditional holistic disciplines without always carrying over the depth, education or responsibility that should come with it.
And this is where many properly trained practitioners begin to feel uneasy.
Because holistic practice is not just about what questions you ask. It is about what you are trained to recognise, hold and respond to in the client sitting in front of you. It is about understanding that what presents physically may also have emotional, energetic or deeply personal layers. It is about knowing how far your role goes, where your boundaries are, and what it means to work responsibly at that level.
That kind of work requires maturity, training and discernment. It cannot be reduced to a brand aesthetic.
This is also why I feel so strongly about education and regulation. Too many short, poorly regulated courses continue to promise professional identity without professional depth. When complex modalities can be packaged into a weekend certificate and sent straight into the marketplace, the public is left to assume that all training is equal. They are not. And practitioners who have invested years in study, practice, supervision and continuing professional development are right to question what that does to the credibility of their field.
If we are serious about standards in advanced aesthetics — and we should be — then we must also be serious about standards across holistic practice. Regulation, transparency and training quality should not matter only when a treatment involves a needle. They also matter when a practitioner is working with vulnerability, trust, health narratives and the broader wellbeing of the person in front of them.
I also believe we need to challenge another assumption: that holistic means soft, vague or less effective. It does not.
Holistic skin practice is not the absence of results. It is not a watered-down alternative to “real” treatment. Done well, it can deliver profound and lasting change. It simply works from a broader understanding of the person and often from a different philosophy of care. It asks not only what needs to be treated, but what needs to be understood. It respects process as well as outcome. And for those of us who work this way, that is not a weakness. It is the strength of the model.
What I am arguing for is not ownership of a word. It is responsibility in how we use it. If “holistic” is to remain meaningful, then our industry needs to be more honest about what it describes. We need clearer distinctions between holistic-inspired branding, holistic-informed consultations and fully qualified holistic practice. We need more respect for the training behind the title. And we need to stop using the word as a catch-all term for anything gentler, greener or more lifestyle-aware.
Because if every business can call itself holistic, regardless of depth, philosophy or training, then the word risks becoming meaningless. And that would be a loss — not only for practitioners, but for clients too.
At its best, holistic practice offers something powerful: a model of care that sees the client as a whole human being, not just a treatment area. For some of us, that means working with the physical, emotional and mental dimensions of health. For others, it also includes an energetic or spiritual awareness that is part of how we understand healing, connection and change.
That depth should not be diluted into a marketing phrase. It should be respected, protected and clearly named.
Because in an industry that is constantly searching for the next trend, that kind of integrity still matters.
You can follow Kathy @gingertreebeauty