Key Takeaways:

• Partnering with creative agency General Idea, known for Prada and Louis Vuitton, RealSelf launched a redesign in September 2025.
• Its “dialed-in bestie” persona sharing insider intel drove an almost immediate uptick in doctor and esthetician contacts.
• New UX features and a shoppable “Worth The Splurge” section aim to boost engagement and revenue across 40K-plus providers.

“Untapped potential.” When Minou Clark was deciding whether to step into the CEO role at RealSelf in the summer of 2024, that’s exactly what she saw in the 20-year-old site—untapped potential The former media executive, whose CV is peppered with stints at Yahoo, PopSugar, and People, Inc., said she couldn’t resist the idea of attaching herself to an entity that had nowhere to go but up. Given the global collective obsession with both “tweakments” and more extensive cosmetic procedures—not to mention at-home devices promising similar results—the time was right for a substantial glow-up.

“I was drawn to RealSelf because it sits at the center of culture, technology, and personal empowerment,” Clark told BeautyMatter. “This space is evolving fast, and the idea of leading a platform that helps people make confident, informed decisions about their bodies felt both meaningful and energizing.” Clark said she saw a company with two decades of history, a fiercely loyal community, and untapped potential, and she knew she “could help unlock the next chapter."

Equal parts consumer-intel community and aesthetics-provider marketplace, RealSelf was established in 2006 by former Expedia executive Tom Seery, Executive Chairman.

While it received a $40 million cash infusion from Elephant, a VC fund led by Warby Parker founder Andy Hunt, back in 2018, no additional monies have been raised since then.

Today, RealSelf serves up before-and-after imagery of more than 500 cosmetics procedures and more than 300K patient reviews.

Still, despite its dominance in the procedure-review space, when Clark officially came on board as CEO in September 2024, she quickly set in motion a major site overhaul. A key goal? Boosting relevancy and social clout.

“Our editorial strategy is anchored in riding the aesthetics cultural wave of radical transparency and meeting modern beauty consumers where they are, with expert-backed and curated content across web, socials and newsletters,” said Clark. “From Love Island reality TV stars showing their glow-up journeys to Kris Jenner’s iconic facelift, conversations around beauty are more open than ever."

Clark has put in place—and is aggressively scaling—what she dubs an “omnichannel flywheel” approach to content development. This, she said, is achieved by “doubling down on our social media and newsletter presence with RealSelf’s first-ever digital team made up of world-class leaders who hail from household-name brands like People Magazine and Hello Sunshine.”

The approach, architected by creative firm General Idea and UX experts Storyarc, and unveiled just a few months ago, is already yielding results. “Social video views and engagements are organically up 177 percent and 130 percent year over year respectively,” Clark noted. “Newsletter subscribers have organically grown 41 percent year over year with open rates consistently over 40 percent. In fact, our newsletter audience has grown so much we’ve launched entirely new offerings—Real Shopping and Real Moms—each targeting different growing audience interests and demographics.”

In addition, the brand has launched a series of seasonal trend reports designed to debrief its audience on the shifts and patterns impacting the aesthetics space and provide a peek into the future.

Asked if boosting the number of providers—i.e., the site’s financial support system —was as important as improving content, Clark was transparent. Currently sitting at 40K+ globally, RealSelf has room for growth on the provider side.

“Both sides of the ecosystem matter; they just serve different parts of our strategy,” said Clark. “Right now, growing and deepening our user base is the bigger priority. When we increase qualified consumer demand, we create more value for our providers and strengthen RealSelf’s role as the authority in aesthetic decision-making.”

More immediate goals on the provider side, not surprisingly, tie back to content.

Clark said that the site is already highly penetrated, so it’s less about expanding the roster and more about activating the network. “We already have [activated the network] by increasing RealSelf’s value by elevating profiles, improving content quality, and providing new ways to show up in front of qualified patients. This next year is about elevating our existing network and finding new ways to put them in front of our users.”

Still, it’s not as if boosting the bottom line isn’t a line item on the RealSelf agenda; the site’s shoppable new “Worth The Splurge” section, stocked with a tightly edited mix of just six items, fully supports its new “Your Best Self Starts Now” tagline and was unveiled as part of the site redesign.

“This shoppable module is new as of the September relaunch, so it currently accounts for a very small percentage of our revenue compared to our legacy business,” said Clark. “However, between this on-site placement and our digital marketing channels, our affiliate revenue increased 373 percent from October to November. Our newsletter subscribers in particular love to shop—even for high-end beauty devices like the LYMA Laser Pro and Dr. Diamond’s Metacine Barrier Moisturizer.”

While still in the early stretch of her tenure as CEO, Clark has set a lofty goal for RealSelf: becoming no less than “the global authority in aesthetic decision-making.” 

Currently, the site serves 10K aesthetics providers outside the US, spanning 115 countries. The company’s subsidiaries, Your New Self and Multiestetica, operate 15 sites across 13 countries.

“Our rebrand leveled up our foundation, but we have a full roster of product and UX improvements in the works for 2026 and beyond,” said Clark, citing enhancements such as instant booking, which will debut first in major US metro markets, and AI features that make finding the right treatment and provider more intuitive.

Alongside a continued investment in the brand’s social presence, growing its newsletter audience, and strictly gatekeeping which providers are allowed on the platform and how they engage with consumers, these add-ons contribute to what Clark described as “a more dynamic, multimedia content ecosystem.”

After all, at least the way Clark sees it, robust content = a healthy RealSelf bottom line.

“Provider growth in the US and beyond happens in parallel with consumer audience growth,” said Clark. “Providers want to be where their future patients are, to get on their radar, nurture that relationship, and win that booking.”