KELLY SAYNOR

KELLY SAYNOR BEYOND THE BOX

From a childhood spent searching for skincare that spoke to her, to a career built on challenging the accepted way of doing things, Kelly Saynor has turned feeling unseen into a determination to make patients and practitioners feel heard. Kezia Parkins meets Aesthetic Medicine’s 2026 Aesthetic Nurse Practitioner of the Year.

When Kelly Saynor’s name was announced as Aesthetic Nurse Practitioner of the Year at the Aesthetic Medicine Awards in May, the moment carried the weight of more than a trophy. It was recognition of a career spanning more than two decades, but also of the convictions she had held onto when the industry around her seemed to reward louder, faster and more commercial ways of working.

“It still hasn’t sunk in,” she tells me. “Every time I see it, I think, ‘What?’ I’m just the most grateful person in the world. The recognition after all those years was unbelievable.”

Saynor is warm, funny and candid, with a mind that moves quickly between clinical care, business, identity, spirituality and the future of aesthetics. Her career has never followed a tidy route. She began in paediatric nursing, moved through cosmetic surgery and medical aesthetics, built Renew Medical Aesthetics in Cheshire, brought The Perfect Peel to the UK, developed her own skincare formulations, founded The Fertility Pharmacy and, most recently, launched The Practitioner Hub. The thread running through all of it is her refusal to accept that something must remain as it is simply because that is how it has always been done.

CHOSEN AND SEEN

To understand where that instinct comes from, Saynor goes back to Jamaica. Born in 1980, she was three months old when the British couple who would become her parents found her in a children’s home. The adoption took a further 18 months to complete, complicated by paperwork and an overstretched system. She remembers the story as one of persistence, community and being deliberately chosen.

“My mum and dad fought hard,” she says. “They weren’t lucky enough to just fall pregnant. They fought hard to adopt my sister and me. I’ve always felt grateful for every drop of life, fully optimistic about every second.”

After the family returned to the UK, Saynor grew up in a predominantly white part of Cheshire. Her parents could not share every aspect of her experience as a Black child, but they worked to make sure she did not have to navigate it alone.

“I didn’t know how to do my hair and I wanted to fit in with my white mates. My mum and dad helped me find somewhere to get it done, but we had to travel to Manchester.”

Her father arranged for Black Beauty & Hair magazine to be delivered to the local newsagent in Congleton.

“Out of all the places it could be in, he got it stocked there just for me. When I appeared in it, I took it back to them and said, ‘I’m in it. I’m in it.’ What a moment. It makes me feel so emotional.”

There were painful experiences too. Saynor recalls racist abuse at school and on public transport, and the feeling of being made conspicuous in spaces where few people looked like her. Her father taught her to interrogate intent and not to internalise other people’s ignorance. More broadly, he encouraged her to debate, question and use the correct words for things rather than hide behind euphemism.

Saynor, her mother, sister and late father

Saynor and her sister back in the day

Saynor by the sea in Jamaica

“He would challenge every notion and not settle for something just because,” she says. “That is where I get my resilience, and the need to challenge the idea that ‘this is just the way we do it’.”

Her father had died only weeks before our conversations. Grief sits close to the surface, but so does gratitude. His influence is everywhere in the way she speaks about curiosity, honesty and refusing to shrink herself to fit a room.

I felt like I was constantly being told to get back in my box for being Black, for being a new nurse, and for being inquisitive about doing things differently.

CARE WITHOUT COMPROMISE

Saynor was drawn to train as a paediatric nurse because she felt it placed care and vulnerability at its centre. Yet the realities of the NHS could feel at odds with the kind of continuity she wanted to give. She found it hard to hand over a child’s care at the end of a shift and struggled in environments where hierarchy or routine seemed to close down questions.

Being a young Black nurse who was also, as she now understands it, navigating undiagnosed ADHD added further layers.

“I felt like I was constantly being told to get back in my box for being Black, for being a new nurse, and for being inquisitive about doing things differently.”

A senior consultant who recognised her commitment became an important mentor and showed her how transformative it can be when one person takes your ideas seriously.

“When you find the one person who believes in you, that sticks with you forever,” she says. “But I have always said that if you become complacent, it is time to leave.”

Her move into cosmetic surgery and aesthetics did not remove the tension between care and commerce. In some early roles, she felt the nurturing qualities of nurses were valued while nurses themselves were treated as replaceable. Sales targets could also pull against clinical judgement. At one industry event, she remembers feeling inadequate because she and a colleague typically used far less filler than the volumes being celebrated from the stage.

The experience sharpened rather than softened her philosophy.

“That just made me recognise how I didn’t want to do things when I opened up my own practice.”

THE ROAD TO RENEW

That philosophy became the foundation of Renew Medical Aesthetics, the Cheshire clinic Saynor began building in 2014. Rather than recreate the target-driven environments she had experienced, she wanted to build a practice where clinical judgement, not sales, set the pace.

Her approach was also shaped by an experience long before she opened Renew. At 20, while at university, Saynor developed Bell’s palsy without warning, leaving one side of her face partially immobile for several months. She initially stayed indoors, but eventually decided she could not stop living her life. When she returned to nights out with friends, strangers would stare or bluntly ask, ‘What is up with your face?’

“It was a very rude awakening into how quickly your looks can change and how you can be viewed by people who don’t even know you,” she says. “It made me realise what it feels like to have people stare at you without invitation.” The experience gave her a deeply personal understanding of what patients living with asymmetry, facial difference or scarring may carry into an aesthetics clinic, and why being seen as a whole person matters.

“The girls will tell you that I run over all the time because all I want to do is put my patients first,” she says. “Every patient gets that completely bespoke element.”

That empathy sits alongside her nursing instincts at Renew. The clinic offers injectables, chemical peels, vein treatments, skin rejuvenation and hair removal, but Saynor’s focus remains on understanding what has brought a patient through the door before deciding whether treatment is appropriate. It is evident in the time she gives to consultations, the wider health and personal factors she considers and her willingness to say no.

Although her business portfolio has expanded considerably, Saynor remains committed to clinical practice. “I would never give up my clinical skills,” she says. “I don’t want to de-skill.”

Renew is therefore more than another arm of her business. It keeps her connected to patients and provides a setting to test her ideas about education, product development, and ethical practice against what people actually need.

SKIN THAT HAD BEEN OVERLOOKED

Saynor’s interest in skin began long before her clinical career. At around 12, she was ordering products advertised in the back of the magazines her dad had gone to great lengths to get her, and asking a question that would eventually shape her business: what is there for me? The beauty world she encountered rarely centred darker skin, and much of what was marketed to Black consumers seemed to frame their skin as something to correct.

Chemical peels were only beginning to gain wider momentum as Saynor entered aesthetics. Her work with an international company regularly took her to the US, where colleagues began telling her about a peel formulated with glutathione.

At the time, she found little practical guidance on the use of stronger peels, particularly on darker skin, and had largely steered clear of them.

She had, however, already started hearing about glutathione. The peel being recommended to her combined it with trichloroacetic acid, retinoic acid, phenol, vitamin C and kojic acid.

“It took a few times of hearing it before I actually paid attention,” she recalls.

“My American colleagues were raving about this amazing ingredient, glutathione and saying the peel, which also had phenol in it, was safe for darker skin, with no preparation. I thought, ‘Come on, somebody is having me on. I don’t believe you.’ I had to get this product and see what it did.”

After trialling the product and being struck by the results, Saynor knew she had to find a way to bring it to the UK.

The manufacturer agreed that Saynor could develop The Perfect Peel for the UK and European markets rather than operate simply as a distributor. That gave her room to reshape the branding and build a more substantial education programme around it, although the international arrangements were not always straightforward.

“We wanted to take it into the UK and have it as our own because we wanted to look and feel different,” she explains. “We didn’t want to be just a distributor. We wanted to do more with the brand.”

That is exactly what she did, with interest flooding in from over 60 countries. ‘Even Guam,’ she laughs. But orders for some territories had to be fulfilled in the original US packaging. That meant a product sold under The Perfect Peel name in Europe didn’t always look like the brand Saynor had built in the UK.

Bringing The Perfect Peel to the UK also meant overcoming a significant insurance barrier. Providers were initially cautious because of its phenol content, so Saynor took her case directly to the underwriters and secured cover. She went on to trademark the name in the UK and Europe around 2014 and 2015 and estimates that she has since trained approximately 3,500 UK practitioners, including some of the most respected names in the sector.

The commercial achievement matters, but she speaks most proudly about the network and education built around the treatment. Training was never meant to be a paint-by-numbers handover of a protocol. She wanted practitioners to understand skin, risk, combinations and decision-making, particularly for patients whose skin had historically been overlooked in aesthetic education.

“We used to go out and train in Glasgow, London, Leeds and Manchester, and we did that for years,” she says. “I loved being with the practitioners and listening to everybody. It is lovely to sit back and know that we have had that positive impact on the industry. That is why the award meant so much.”

That work later expanded through Medica Forte and Saynor’s own formulations, now presented under PRFKT and PRFKT Pro.

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE CERTIFICATE

For Saynor, one of the sector’s most persistent problems is what happens after formal training. Nursing offered a recognisable pathway in which responsibility developed alongside experience. Aesthetics, by contrast, can encourage practitioners to view a qualification as an endpoint, even when they have had limited exposure to difficult consultations, complications, regulation or the pressures of running a business.

“There is no continual pathway and no real reference point where you can ask, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’” she says. “You need a mentor. Somebody who has been out in the field and had the pitfalls and experienced the good, the bad and the mistakes, and learnt from them. That is how you know how to put something right.”

The Practitioner Hub is her response to the gap between completing a course and developing professional judgement. The membership offers themed modules, videos, articles, downloadable resources and access to live sessions. Subjects extend beyond technique into prescribing, regulation, patient assessment, treating skin of colour, choosing products and building a sustainable clinic.

She describes the platform as the place where she can share the information practitioners have long asked her for privately: what to buy, what to avoid, how to choose training, how to handle uncertainty and how to resist commercial pressure. It is also a place to be honest about mistakes. “I wanted to create a community of real advice,” she says. “We had to make our own way. I don’t want people to feel they have to do that alone.”

STAYING HUMAN IN A NOISY INDUSTRY

Saynor’s ADHD is, in her words, both “a blessing and a curse”. It can bring overstimulation and overthinking, but it also fuels the pattern recognition, curiosity and prolific idea generation visible across her businesses. It may also explain why she resists reducing herself to a polished professional persona. She finds conventional self-promotion uncomfortable, particularly when authenticity becomes another marketing strategy.

Her Barefaced Chat podcast offers a format that feels more natural: long, meandering conversations that can move from aesthetics and race to hair, spirituality and the ordinary complexities of being human. That breadth is not a distraction from her professional message. It is the message. A practitioner who stops seeing the whole person, she argues, risks allowing the aesthetics bubble to distort both language and care.

“I find it far more interesting to listen to people talk authentically about their lives,” she says. “The conversation can move from spirituality to aesthetics, being Black, being a woman, hair braiding, any tangent possible. That is the easiest way for me to get my point across without feeling pressure.”

It also helps her resist what she calls “aesthetics land”. “I don’t want to get sucked into it,” she says. “It can dilute the way you talk to your patients.”

For all her ventures, the measure Saynor returns to is strikingly simple: can she sleep at night knowing that she has looked after her patients properly? When competitors appear louder, clinics sell more product, or the industry celebrates visibility over substance, she reminds herself not to mistake aggression for success.

“This industry is for me. It always has been and always will be,” she says. “But I don’t want to lose sight of who I am or what I believe in.”

Winning the Aesthetic Medicine award gave external recognition to that quieter form of leadership. The next chapter, through education, product development, clinical work and the growing Practitioner Hub, is about making her hard-won knowledge easier for others to access. Saynor has spent much of her life learning what it means to be seen. Now, she is using that experience to make space for other people to be heard.