With summer in full swing, it’s time to get out and enjoy the long, sunny days while looking and feeling your best. San Diego is home to some world-class aestheticians, plastic surgeons, and dermatologists who can give you exactly the results you’re seeking. Whether you’re hoping to peel back the years on the outside with a state-of-the-art facelift or cosmetic laser or fine-tune your internal care regimen with IV therapy and vitamin infusions, there’s a treatment out there for everyone—from veterans of aesthetic medical care to those just beginning to look into what lasers and injectables can do for them.
Even the most transformative procedures are becoming increasingly downtime-free. You can spend less time recovering and more time enjoying your revitalized face and body. Above all else, the pros on this list of San Diego aesthetic experts aren’t about trying to get rid of the old you; instead, they’re here to help bring out your favorite version of yourself.
Cultivé Medical Aesthetics
As San Diego’s premiere destination for regenerative aesthetics and wellness, Cultivé Medical Aesthetics believes that beauty comes from within. The focus is always about delivering intentional, non-invasive, personalized treatments and therapies. No treatment epitomizes this more than the Morpheus8 Face & Body, which gently activates your body’s own collagen and elastin production, with minimal downtime. Other treatments include IPL photofacials, laser hair removal, vitamin IV infusions, and GLP-1 for weight loss. The center’s team prides itself on being refreshingly real with patients. Expect straightforward advice from experts who not only listen to you but care about your results and journey.
Cosmetic Laser Dermatology
The board-certified and nationally acclaimed dermatologists at Cosmetic Laser Dermatology provide clients with truly transformational results, all without surgery. From Botox and other injectables to lasers and body sculpting treatments, Cosmetic Laser Dermatology offers more than 80 procedures and 60 lasers that reduce wrinkles and sculpt, tighten, and revitalize skin. The center is best known for its three-laser, single-session Take10, which removes 10+ years from patients’ faces without the risks, scarring, or long recovery times associated with going under the knife. Whatever the procedure, all patients receive one-on-one guidance and a customized treatment plan to ensure their questions are answered and their needs and goals are met.
Holden Timeless Beauty
Holden Timeless Beauty helps patients hold time back to age better at every stage of life through the use of innovative medical aesthetics. Founder, CEO, and medical director Dr. Amanda Holden uses her wealth of experience to develop customized treatment plans and create natural-looking results that enhance your individual beauty. She and her team of advanced injectors regularly treat patients from age 20 to 80 with state-of-the-art technology and FDA-approved techniques. The practice offers treatments such as the Emsculpt Neo, a non-invasive, body-sculpting technology that increases muscle mass and eliminates fat, and the EMFACE, a nonsurgical facelift device that reduces wrinkles while toning and lifting.
SKY Facial Plastic Surgery
SKY Facial Plastic Surgery offers the kind of care you’d expect in Beverly Hills right in North County. Led by double-board-certified facial plastic surgeon Dr. Sirius K. Yoo (the only San Diego surgeon with a Stanford facial plastic surgery fellowship) and attracting patients from as far away as Europe, SKY Facial Plastic Surgery specializes in providing natural results that make people say, “You look amazing, but I can’t quite put my finger on what’s different.” And if you’re not ready for an operation, consider the SKY Glow to achieve that radiant, refreshed look with no downtime.
Lushful Aesthetics
Men travel from all over the world to visit Lushful Aesthetics, the experts in male aesthetics. The clinic was founded by Chris Bustamante, known on Instagram @InjectorChris. Bustamante employs his unique background as a leading aesthetic nurse practitioner with training in sexual health urology and proctology to offer a range of innovative and effective nonsurgical aesthetic procedures addressing men’s facial and body aesthetic concerns. He also uses his platform to promote a deeper understanding of the process behind men’s aesthetic treatments. Lushful Aesthetics specializes in procedures such as Girth Enhancement, ScroFill®, jawline filler, and more.
The Latest and Greatest
With so many treatments out there, everyone can use a little guidance on what’s worth the hype. So why not ask the experts? Here are some of the newest, most advanced, and most popular options out there, each given the gold seal of approval by a few of our favorite aesthetic gurus.
Cosmetic Laser Dermatology’s Propriety Take10 Treatment: Lose a decade of aging from your face with one afternoon appointment. This revolutionary, nonsurgical facelift tackles troublesome red or brown spots, bothersome wrinkles, or increasingly lax skin while producing tailored, individual results.
Cultivé Medical Aesthetics’s Morpheus8 Face & Body: This subtle yet transformative procedure delivers precise skin rejuvenation without invasive surgery. By activating your skin’s own collagen and elastin, the Morpheus8 delivers a refreshed, radiant you.
Lushful Aesthetics’s Jawline Filler: Enhance your face’s natural contours with jawline fillers that add volume and redefine the angles of your profile. Every treatment is personalized to the client’s needs and anatomy, but the end result is always a more balanced, youthful-looking visage.
Holden Timeless’s Beauty’s EMFACE: This FDA-approved device provides a nonsurgical facelift using a combination of Synchronized Radiofrequency and HIFES to redefine and sculpt facial muscles while tightening skin. The treatment takes just 20 minutes and requires little to no recovery time.
SKY Facial Plastic Surgery’s SKY Glow: The SKY Glow is a personalized program of lasers, injectables, and skincare using minimally invasive, advanced techniques. The results? Enhanced natural beauty and revitalized confidence, all achieved without any recovery downtime.
The Best Gym in San Diego Isn’t Really a Gym Anymore
Earlier this year, Fit quietly dropped "athletic" from its brand, from Fit Athletic Clubs to simply Fit, and started calling itself something new: a social wellness club.
There’s a version of San Diego that lives in two extremes. On one side, the 5 a.m. crowd: biohackers, marathoners, people who’ve already logged a cold plunge before your alarm goes off. On the other, the after-dark crowd, the ones chasing sunset happy hours and late dinners with friends. Everyone seems to be either optimizing or unwinding, and most of us feel like we’re failing at both.
Fit, San Diego’s reigning Best Gym for the third year running, has built its entire identity around erasing that divide.
Walk into one of Fit’s three San Diego locations on a Tuesday afternoon and the lines blur fast. Someone’s mid-set on the squat rack. Someone else has a laptop open at a café table a few feet away, half-working, half-people-watching. A group is trading plans for the weekend’s event by the recovery lounge. Nobody’s in a rush to leave.
“We’re not competing for the same people,” says Emily Waybright, Public Relations Manager at Fit, addressing the arrival of a national luxury gym chain in San Diego this year. “We don’t really feel like we’re in the gym category. It’s this unique thing.”
That unique thing has a name now. Earlier this year, Fit quietly dropped “athletic” from its brand, from Fit Athletic Clubs to simply Fit, and started calling itself something new: a social wellness club.
It’s a small wording change with a bigger idea behind it. Fit was never built around escaping the workday. It was built around the people who genuinely like what they do, and who want workouts, work, and friendships to happen in the same place instead of three separate ones. Because sometimes red light therapy with a stranger turns into weekend plans.
Fit’s philosophy traces back to its founder, who started the brand nearly two decades ago after failing to find a gym he actually wanted to belong to. He looked instead to the old-school country club, where people came for a shared interest and stayed for the community. His version was made for a younger generation, minus the golf, plus the loud music.
Which makes it a little ironic that the very award putting Fit back in the spotlight this year is Best Gym.
What does the best traditional gym look like when the definition of a gym is becoming less traditional? It’s a fair question, and Fit’s answer is that the fitness industry itself is shifting. The 45-minutes-in, 45-minutes-out model is giving way to something closer to a genuine third space, the kind of role the office and the bar used to play before remote work and changing nightlife habits rearranged how people spend their time
For Fit, community isn’t a marketing add-on to fitness. It’s the through-line. Members aren’t just paying for a treadmill; they’re paying for an entire day of social wellness that’s built on performance, recovery, connection, and a plan for the next event on the calendar. That’s a much harder membership to walk away from.
Ambition and ease aren’t opposites here, they exist side by side, where passion and play share the same morning. On September 12, Fit is hosting Sol, a full day wellness festival at Fit Social. The morning focuses on wellness classes and vendors and then the evening is a full party with multiple DJ sets and an open bar. Think of it as a kick-off to locals’ summer in San Diego.
Ready to see what a social wellness club actually looks like? Visit fitclubs.com, or follow along at @thefitclubs on Instagram.
Growing up, Laika Nur, MD, Scripps Clinic sports medicine specialist, loved watching beach volleyball when the Association of Volleyball Professionals tour came to her hometown of Chicago. A talented volleyball player herself, she remembers sitting in the stands all day, and once, even got a couple autographs. Years later, Dr. Nur was attending a professional event focused on women’s sports, and the discussion turned to a new professional women’s volleyball league. The general manager and coaching staff for San Diego’s team, the Mojo, happened to be in attendance, and Dr. Nur took the opportunity to ask them if they needed a team doctor. Flash forward to the Mojo’s inaugural 2024 season, when Dr. Nur officially became the team physician. Click here to read more about Dr. Nur and how she incorporates lessons she learned on the court into her practice.
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Your feet and ankles probably aren’t something you give much thought to—until something goes wrong. Orthopedic surgeons at Scripps Clinic are on the leading edge of foot and ankle reconstruction, treating patients with sports injuries, deformities, traumatic injuries and other conditions. That includes repairing torn Achilles tendons with a minimally invasive procedure that shrinks the incision site to less than a centimeter, and performing advanced ankle replacement on some patients with ankle arthritis. Read more about Scripps’ innovations in foot and ankle care here.
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Mai Vue was just 34 weeks pregnant when she delivered her baby. Her pregnancy had been complicated, and she’d had a recent second trimester pregnancy loss, which led to her receiving specialized care from Sean Daneshmand, MD, a Scripps Clinic perinatologist who oversees high-risk pregnancies. Dr. Daneshmand and his team took care of Mai during her pregnancy, through the birth of her healthy baby girl and beyond. Mai was part of a program Scripps launched to provide support to new moms in the weeks and months after delivery. The postpartum program, known as Scripps Health’s Fourth Trimester Continuum of Care, provides care for women with high-risk pregnancies to optimize their health after childbirth and reduce the risk of complications in future pregnancies. Click here to learn more.
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It’s estimated that one in five people in the U.S. will develop skin cancer at some point in their lives. When you factor in living in a sun-soaked city like San Diego and the outdoorsy lifestyle that comes with it, that figure can jump to as high as one in three, which makes early detection and intervention all the more important. Dermatologists at Bighorn Mohs and Dermatology Center are using innovative imaging methods and advanced surgical techniques to diagnose and treat skin cancer. For certain cancers in sensitive spots, like the face, dermatologists perform Mohs surgery, removing skin tissue layer by layer until reaching healthy, cancer-free tissue. They also use a process called immunohistochemistry to view tissue samples taken during Mohs surgery in far greater detail than previous methods. Read more about how Scripps is advancing skin cancer care here.
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When endurance athlete Isaac Sanchez learned he had cancer, he felt blindsided. He was healthy, surfed often and was training for an Ironman triathlon. But he had to put that on hold to undergo treatment. His physicians at Scripps Cancer Center developed a plan to treat the cancer in his tonsil and lymph nodes that included six-and-a-half weeks of near-daily radiation and weekly chemotherapy. He also worked with a Scripps Cancer Center dietitian to enhance his nutrition to promote strength and healing. Today, Isaac’s back to doing what he loves. Read more of his story here.
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