mandatory qualifications, although some treatments can cause serious complications. In Liverpool the BBC found 26 cosmetic training academies offering courses ranging in price from £150 to £5,000 in 2021, lasting from a couple of hours online to a couple of days of face-to-face training. A professionally trained cosmetic doctor, Vincent Wong, said that a thread lift is the most dangerous procedure an aesthetic practitioner can do. A great many things can go wrong, more so than any injectable treatment, because threads stay in the skin and cannot be pulled out; while the results can be very good, the procedure can also cause irreversible damage. The professional training of Wong—already a physician with a degree in surgery—in this procedure involved four courses over three months. A nurse sent undercover by the BBC to take and secretly film a course teaching thread lifting was shocked at the unprofessionalism and unsafe practices she was taught. While exceptional sterility is required to avoid possible long-term infection, there was no attempt to control infection. The tutor touched various objects and then the patient's face, and the procedure was carried out on a chair instead of a clean bed. Several blood vessels were accidentally punctured, and the patient was clearly in severe pain. Patients drank alcohol before the treatment and vaped during it. Ashton Collins, the director of Save Face, a national register of accredited medical practitioners that provide non-surgical cosmetic treatments, said that "there's no doubt that if people following that course go on to do treatments [it] will cause a lot of complications". MACS facelift The term MACS-lift – or Minimal Access Cranial Suspension lift – allows for the correction of sagging facial features through a short, minimal incision, elevating them vertically by suspending them from above. There are many advantages to having a MACS facelift versus a traditional facelift. For starters, the MACS-lift uses a shorter scar that is in front of the ear, instead of behind, which is much easier to hide. Overall, the MACS-lift surgery is safer because less skin is raised. This means that there is less risk of bleeding and nerve damage. The operation also takes less time, lasting 2.5 hours instead of the 3.5 hours that the traditional facelift requires. There is also a shorter recovery period, 2–3 weeks instead of 3–4 weeks. Finally, the results of the MACS-lift are very natural while the traditional facelift will often