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Anni Kim never thought she’d make the switch from patient bedsides to Botox.
An RN with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, she worked as a surgical trauma ICU and rapid response nurse at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, NH for over seven years — before switching to become an aesthetic injector for board-certified plastic and reconstructive surgeon Dr. Leif Rogers.
Kim initially got into nursing because of a deep desire to help people, she told The Post.
However, as she developed “more critical thinking skills” over her years in the hospital, the New Englander started to question the institution’s consistent understaffing — especially after the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic and a personal re-awakening on the importance of patient dignity, following her grandfather’s cancer diagnoses.
“I was just like, this is not right — they were understaffing us to save money on their end for who knows what,” Kim recalled in an interview. “Every shift, you’re set up to fail, and if you survive that shift, it’s like, ‘Oh great, you survived another day.’…Patients can’t get the care they need, which leads to more problems in the long run.”
At Dartmouth, she was earning $120,000 a year. After quitting, she briefly tried out travel nursing, raking in $4,000 to $5,000 a week. Still, she admitted, “no amount of money” would have kept her working in hospitals. The Post sought comment from Dartmouth-Hitchcock, but did not immediately hear back.
When Kim started out in aesthetics, she took a sharp pay cut — down to $30 an hour, enough that she couldn’t quite leave her old life at first, supplementing her pay with hospital shifts. Now, she’s completely free — and bringing in roughly $130,000 a year, she said.
“There’s this kind of saying in medicine that nothing’s actually done about (an issue) until someone dies,” she continued. “I don’t think we should wait until that point — that’s common sense — but apparently, it’s not. Morally, I just couldn’t do it anymore.”
Roughly 15,000 New York City nurses have expressed similar frustrations over the past week, populating picket lines in what has become the largest nurses’ strike in the city’s history to date. Nurses, primarily from Mount Sinai, New York-Presbyterian/Columbia and Montefiore Medical Center, are accusing the big-budget institutions of not providing adequate resources for patient safety and basic nurse protections.
The call for significant fixes to staffing issues and pay increases has been addressed with a BandAid of temporary nurses (who the striking nurses say are overworked) and met with a fair amount of resistance by the medical centers, who are saying they’ve already made strides in addressing former versions of these complaints.
Given the stormy waters in New York, it’s perhaps unsurprising that thousands of nurses across the country have been quietly stepping away from their hectic hospital roles altogether — and are now choosing the relative calm of medical spas, where some are making far more, even if the transition can be bumpy, salary-wise.
According to Nurse.org, registered nurses in New York currently have a starting hourly average of $33.70, adding up to an annual salary of $70,087 a year. In California, starting pay is slightly lower, with novice nurses earning an average of $30.18, totaling to an annual salary of $62,776. Union members in cities like NYC can earn far more.
Meanwhile, on average, aesthetic nurses in New York typically make $42.25 an hour, or $87,874 annually, while aesthetic nurses in California on average make $38.11 an hour, or $79,269 salary. As they did for Kim, those numbers can climb significantly with experience.
Dr. Rose Sherman – an RN and bestselling author with a doctorate in nursing leadership — said she’s seen a recent uptick of medical nurses turning to careers in aesthetics over the past year — forgoing the life-or-death workload of hospitals and medical centers, in favor of administering fillers and facial treatments.
“I started hearing from (hospital managers) about this trend, that they were observing some of their staff — not only the new staff — coming in and saying their ultimate goal was to work in med spas,” Sherman told The Post. “Some of their own staff were already picking up part-time positions and taking coursework on how to give Botox, etc.”
Sherman shared that while the number of registered nurses currently employed in med spas — about 10- to 15,000 — is “not really a huge number” compared to the over 4 million RNs across the nation, it illustrates a growing trend of nurses “actively looking for roles that they think are going to be more fulfilling outside of acute care environments.”
“(Medical nursing) doesn’t pay as well and the work is harder, so that’s really the challenge for healthcare,” explained Sherman. “It’s not that these nurses shouldn’t be working in these med spas, or that they don’t have the talent for it…The flip side is it’s just another drain-off from other aspects of nursing where the need is very great.”
Bea Ohanian — previously a COVID-era nurse who now is a board-certified nurse practitioner working in aesthetics and regenerative medicine — is earning more in aesthetics than her previous medical environment, though it took her three years of working in Los Angeles to surpass her hospital pay.
“It’s definitely possible to make more money in aesthetics over time, but it takes about two to four years of consistent hustling to make it out of the trenches and build enough clientele where people are requesting you by name and are loyal to you,” Ohanian told The Post. “Especially in L.A., where it’s super saturated. (In the beginning), you’re a novice nurse all over again.”
Ohanian stated that she made $52 an hour during a stint at L.A.’s PIH Health Good Samaritan hospital. She took a pay cut when she first made the transition to aesthetics — making $30 an hour with no commission, which eventually ramped up to $75 an hour with commission rates varying from 5 to 15 percent, depending on client volume.
She now makes over $100,000 a year, bringing home $8,000 to $10,000 a month after taxes, she said.
Though Ohanian may have started out at a high volume hospital to gain experience, her ultimate goal was a career in aesthetic nursing, she admitted.
“There were no jobs (in aesthetic nursing) at that point,” said Ohanian. “So I thought it would be a good idea to try to be a hospital nurse and get the knowledge from that environment…But I only lasted a year.”
As a new grad, Ohanian started out on the COVID-19 floor at Good Samaritan, where protocols were “constantly changing” and there was not always the required ratio of nurses to patients.
“I remember one time, management came to tell us we would be out of ratio for the night — it was my second week on the floor alone, and I started crying,” she recalled. “(They) said, ‘Oh, you’ll be fine.’ He was so robotic in the way he was talking to me. The only way I got through my shift was with the other nurses who pitched in.”
While Ohanian initially had assumed she’d be working in a hospital on a per diem basis for the rest of her career in order to “keep (her) foot in an acute care setting,” the poor effect that work had on her mental health led her to switch to aesthetics altogether.
Not that life in her chosen field doesn’t come with its own unique challenges. Ohanian maintained that while aesthetic nursing may not always deal in the extremes of life versus death, it’s not nearly “as glamorous as it looks on TikTok and social media.”
“When you first start in aesthetics, you think everything seems easy because the nurses make it look so effortless,” she explained. “But once you start actually trying to do good work, you realize that a lot of things can go very wrong when you’re holding a needle to someone’s face. Being able to navigate that properly is super important.”
“To know how to inject properly — not just to make (patients) look good but to stay safe — is something a lot of people don’t realize about aesthetics,” Ohanian continued. “It takes (knowledge of) anatomy and understanding vessels, arteries, muscles and nerves, things you don’t learn in nursing school unless you’re specializing in the field.”
While Ohanian doesn’t miss her days working in an acute care hospital environment, she does credit the experience for helping her become the aesthetic nurse she is today. She also encourages medical nurses who have a true passion for the field to transition, if that’s what they feel called to do.
“There’s a huge pay cut in the beginning and you most likely have to start at a med spa doing things like laser hair removal at first, and spending thousands of dollars of your own money to train…that kind of deters (nurses) from it unless they’re super passionate about aesthetics. It’s not just something to do to get out of the hospital.”
