How we rank.

Most "best med spa" lists are advertising with a headline on top. Somebody paid, or somebody's affiliate link is buried in the button. I wanted the version that doesn't exist yet: one rubric, applied the same way to every provider in Boulder County, with the math shown.

The seven dimensions

What's scored now, and what waits for a visit

Five of the seven dimensions come from public evidence: credentials, reviews, services, pricing, and booking. Those are live for all 262 providers today, and the scores you see are calculated only from those five, renormalized so the math still lands on 100.

Consultation quality and facility safety can't be judged from a website. I'd rather show you a partial score honestly than a complete-looking one I made up, so right now every score you see is built from the five dimensions I can measure from public evidence, stretched to a 0-100 scale.

Here's the wrinkle, and I'd rather explain it than quietly work around it. If I start folding visit scores into the number as I go, the first providers I visit get measured against all seven dimensions while everyone else is measured against five. A place could score well on my visit and still drop in the rankings, purely for having been visited. That's backwards, and it would also give me a quiet lever over the rankings, which is the whole thing this site exists not to have.

So visits currently do two things: the profile gets a dated "visited in person" mark, and it gets my written take. The score stays put. Once enough providers have been visited for the comparison to be fair, the two in-person dimensions go into the number for everyone at once, and I'll say plainly on this page when that happens.

Why price transparency is weighted so heavily

Because it's the industry's worst habit, and because it's the one thing on this list a business can fix this afternoon.

Of the providers on this site, fewer than a third publish a real per-unit or per-session price. Most ask you to book a consultation to find out what something costs, which is a sales appointment wearing a medical coat. At 20 percent, and with only five of the seven dimensions currently scored, publishing prices moves a provider a long way up this list. That is deliberate. A clinic that won't tell you the price before you're in the chair does not belong at the top of an honest ranking, however good its credentials are.

It's graded rather than a tick box. A published per-syringe or per-unit price earns full marks. A "packages starting at $X" earns partial credit, because it's better than silence but it still isn't a number you can compare.

How the review score works

Star averages on their own are close to useless in this industry. Nearly everyone sits between 4.7 and 5.0, and a brand new clinic with eleven glowing reviews will show a perfect score.

So the review dimension weighs the rating, the volume it was earned across, and how specific recent reviews actually are. A rating built from hundreds of reviews counts for more than the same rating from a handful.

The specificity part is worth explaining, because it's unusual. I count the share of a provider's past-year reviews that name a real procedure or a real clinician, at any star rating. Not just the glowing ones. A detailed one-star review is some of the best evidence on the internet, and the rating is already scored separately, so filtering specificity down to five-star reviews would just count positivity twice and reward clinics that coach reviewers on what to write.

How credentials are scored, and a correction

This dimension looks for licenses attached to actual named people on a provider's own site: how many clinicians are named, whether a physician is among them, whether a PA or nurse practitioner is, and whether the practice states board certification or a medical director.

It didn't always. Until 27 July 2026 this dimension was mostly a business-category constant plus a bonus that, because of a bug in how credentials were detected, every single provider received. It barely distinguished anyone. It does now, and some scores moved a long way as a result. I'd rather say that plainly than quietly change the numbers.

Where the data comes from

• Their own websites. Services, pricing, credentials, and booking, read from published pages.
• Google Business Profiles. Ratings, review counts, and photos.
• Google reviews. Over 7,400 collected across the 262 providers. Quotes shown on the site must be from the past year and must name a specific procedure.
• In-person visits. Ongoing, and always dated on the profile.

What would change a score

Scores aren't frozen. They move when a provider publishes pricing, adds or loses a credentialed provider, changes their service menu, or accumulates a meaningfully different body of reviews. If you own one of these businesses and something here is out of date or wrong, tell me and I'll check it.

What this is not

It's not medical advice, and it isn't a safety certification. A high score means a provider looks strong on the things I can measure. It doesn't mean a given treatment is right for you, and it isn't a substitute for a real consultation with a licensed clinician who has examined you.