DR LYNN THERON, 40, is a cosmetic physician at Clinic 42 in Auckland and an emergency medicine specialist at Auckland Hospital. She lives in Remuera with her partner and six-year-old daughter.

A The emergency medicine side is something I’m very passionate about because of the excitement. It really is like ER or Casualty. It has that amount of drama in it. I like helping people who are in a situation of crisis – I think that brings out my best attributes. I’m one of those people that can keep calm in relative storms.

My work in emergency medicine sometimes sees me come home at 2 or 3am, so I always have to sleep until at least 7am.

With the [cosmetic] side of my work (a very different hat), I’ve always really liked art. In Africa, where I grew up, I always used to make different kinds of pots down at the river bed. I’d dig out all the clay and make these marvellous things. That’s kind of where my love for art really started. Fifteen years ago there was this thing called cosmedc medicine where you could sculpt people’s faces -just incredible. I could now do something that could enhance somebody’s life. I could make them look better than they did when they walked in. I’ve had clients for 15 years and they look better now than they did then.

Every time I do something to somebody they [go on to] interact with the world. My art’s really moving through the world every day.

A lot of my work involves listening very closely. I listen a lot to what’s happening in my clients’ lives and then I look at them from a sculptural point of view and see how their face moves, what expressions they’re using, what’s making which lines worse and what we don’t want to remove so they lose the ability to express themselves. I get them to look in the mirror and say which features they see because I have to get a feeling of what they like.  I have to get into their headspace.

Some I’ll send away with the literature, others are happy to go ahead with the treatment straight away. I glove up, put my hair in a pony tail so it doesn’t flop everywhere and then decide on the technique. With botox, which I do lots of, we relax certain muscles of the face in strategic positions by using a tiny insulin needle.

Our whole focus is keeping it as painless as possible. A lot of photography gets done – we have before and after photos. We’ve got a huge database so people can see how they’re progressing.

A large part of my work when I sculpt is with dermal fillers. It’s like our polyfilller – if there’s a crack, we fill it. That’s where you have to have a really good eye. People will say in the media, “This person looks freaky,” and it’s because they’ve been altered just slightly too much by having too much put in the cheek or jaw line. We use blunt needles, making little holes in the skin and threading it through.

There are many people who do botox but everybody’s style is slightly different – it’s infinitesimally small but it’s about the part of the muscle, the depth of the needle, how many units and it will give you a little bit of a different look to what someone else has done.

It’s an incredible trust. In some ways it’s more of a trust than you have in the emergency department. In the emergency department you’re thrown in there and you have no choice, whereas here you’re going to change the way someone presents themselves to the world.

A quarter of my clients are men and they usually go for botox and fillers, particularly around their eyes. They always bring their girlfriends but the women don’t usually bring their partners because often she doesn’t want him to know.

The youngest client I have is 25 and the oldest 85. Some travel from as far as Queenstown and Christchurch to see me.

I’m not a plastic surgeon; that’s not what I aspire to be. I always call us the soft porn of the industry. For some people it’s really necessary for their psycho-social wellbeing to look the best they possibly can. If you look at the studies, people who look more attractive earn more money; people who look more attractive are happier. So when it comes to what’s necessary and what’s unnecessary, it’s a more difficult question. The Best Bit … is making people look and feel the best they can and the ongoing good relationships you have with them for many years.