AHPRA cosmetic consent requirements: what the 2025 guidelines mean for your clinic

The 2025 AHPRA guidelines for non-surgical cosmetic procedures, in effect from September 2025, require practitioners to provide written and verbal plain-language information about the nature, risks, benefits, alternatives, practitioner qualifications, and cost of a procedure; to observe a mandatory seven-day cooling-off period for patients under 18; and to meet tighter advertising and consent expectations across injectables, fillers, fat-dissolving, threads, laser, and peels.

For cosmetic and aesthetic clinics, consent is now the most heavily and most recently regulated part of the patient journey. A single rushed consent form is no longer defensible, and in several respects is an explicit breach.

Written information, in plain language

The guidelines require that the patient receives written information, not just a verbal explanation, covering risks, benefits, alternatives, the practitioner’s qualifications, and cost. For dermal filler, that includes naming the rare but catastrophic risk of vascular occlusion. For laser and peels, it includes skin-type-specific burn and pigment risk.

Delivering this as structured, sectioned content the patient reads at their own pace, in their own language, with a comprehension check on the key risks, both meets the requirement and proves it was met.

Cooling-off and photography, made auditable

The mandatory seven-day cooling-off period for under-18s is only as good as the clinic’s ability to show it was observed. Recording the date of the first consultation and the date the patient became eligible to proceed turns an assumed period into an auditable one.

Before-and-after photography is a fast-growing source of complaint. Separating consent for records, education, and marketing or social-media use, each independently given and independently withdrawable, protects both the patient and the practitioner. Blanket photo consent no longer meets the expectation.

How GetConsent evidences compliance

GetConsent delivers the AHPRA-required written information, a documented cooling-off acknowledgement, granular and withdrawable photography consent, and an itemised cost estimate, as one mobile journey for each patient. Every step is captured in a hash-chained evidence pack that shows what information was provided, that the cooling-off period was observed, and that the patient understood the key risks.

For a cosmetic clinic, that is the difference between hoping you met the 2025 guidelines and being able to prove, patient by patient, that you did.