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📍Skinsplendid, One Bellevue Plaza, Suite 5, Montclair, NJ 07043
On a recent Saturday morning, The Montclair Pod stepped into Skinsplendid, the airy aesthetics studio tucked inside One Bellevue Plaza, to meet Nurse Christine Adams – she’s known to most of her patients simply as Nurse Christy – and her team. The waiting room was calm but quietly buzzing, the kind of energy that comes from clients arriving not for transformation, but for care and maintenance.
If you expect a med spa to feel transactional, Skinsplendid does not. There is no glossy “menu” of procedures to select from, no laminated sheet of packages to upsell. Instead, consultations begin the old-fashioned way: by looking at a face and asking questions.
“We’re very pro everything,” Adams said early in our visit. “We’re pro aging.”
It is a small shift in language, but one that defines the practice she built in 2021, shortly after the pandemic reshaped not only how people worked and socialized, but how closely they examined their own faces on screens.
A Nurse Who Questioned the Industry
Before opening Skinsplendid, which now operates in both Montclair and New York City, Adams spent years in hospital settings and alongside plastic surgeons as a Board-certified adult care nurse practitioner. She understands clinical structure, medical safety, and the psychology of patients. What she wanted, she says, was a space where people would not feel rushed or pushed into procedures that weren’t right for them.
Aesthetics, she believes, should function more like primary care than retail. You don’t walk in and pull a treatment off a shelf. You sit. You assess. You talk.
That philosophy extends to how she built the business. It is privately held and family-run. One daughter, who initially trained in cardiology, now works alongside her as an injector. Another manages operations. Word of mouth, particularly in Montclair, where Adams has lived and raised her family, fueled the early growth.
Patients return not because the results are dramatic, but because they are not.
Rethinking Botox
If there is one treatment most associated with modern aesthetics, it is Botox. And if there is one assumption most patients carry into a consultation, it is that Botox erases wrinkles.
Adams approaches it differently.
“I don’t do Botox for the wrinkle,” she said. “I do it for the lift.”
Traditionally, Botox is placed in the muscles that contract and create expression lines, particularly across the forehead. The effect is smoother skin, but sometimes at the cost of heaviness or a frozen appearance. As Adams herself moved through her 40s and 50s, she began to question whether that approach still served a mature face.
“When you’re 27, everything looks good,” she said with a laugh. “But when you’re in your fifties, does it still look good?”
She noticed that traditional placement could weigh down the eyelids or subtly change facial expression in ways she did not love. In old photographs, she felt she looked stern or angry, even when she wasn’t.
So she began experimenting with placement and dosage. Over time, she developed what she now calls “Sprinkle-Tox,” a technique that uses smaller, strategically placed amounts of Botox in depressor muscles — the muscles that pull the face downward and inward — rather than solely targeting those that lift.
The idea is simple but anatomically nuanced: relax the downward pull and the face subtly lifts upward and outward. During an evaluation, Adams studies eyebrow shape, eyelid heaviness, jawline definition and tension in the chin. By softening specific points, she sharpens the jawline and elevates the brow without erasing expression.
She still has wrinkles, she points out. And she still has Botox.
The goal is not immobility. It is balance.
Less Filler, More Restraint
The same restraint defines her approach to dermal filler. Where some practices rely on multiple syringes to dramatically reshape cheeks or lips, Adams describes her technique as “airbrushing.” The product is placed lightly, incrementally, often over time. The effect is cumulative rather than immediate.
Increasingly, she says, she sees patients seeking the opposite of more. They arrive after feeling overfilled elsewhere, asking to dissolve what was done. Skinsplendid uses ultrasound technology — not as a diagnostic tool, but as a visualization aid — to look beneath the skin, identify previous filler and assess vascular structures before injecting. It functions almost like an advanced vein finder, adding an extra layer of precision and safety.
The emphasis throughout is anatomical respect. Work with the original face, not against it.
The Ladder
Around the clinic, several nurses wear delicate ladder necklaces. The symbol represents the “clinical ladder,” a hospital framework through which nurses master foundational skills before advancing to more complex procedures.
Adams adopted that structure for aesthetics. Both staff training and patient care move stepwise: skincare before injectables, Botox before filler, biostimulators before lasers. Arithmetic before calculus, as she puts it.
In an industry that has seen rapid growth and private equity investment, the slower approach stands out. There is no rush to escalate treatment. Patients are encouraged to start minimally and reassess.
“You might not need more,” she tells them.
Beyond Vanity
To outsiders, cosmetic injectables can appear frivolous or purely aesthetic. Adams frames them differently. She sees psychological wellbeing as part of health care. Patients frequently tell her they feel more confident in professional settings, more comfortable on camera, more aligned with how they see themselves internally.
One woman, she recalled, credited a subtle treatment with giving her the confidence to interview for a job she had long hesitated to pursue.
“It’s like putting your oxygen mask on first,” Adams said. “If you feel good about yourself, you can take care of other people.”
Inside Skinsplendid, the language avoids “anti-aging.” There is no war against time. Instead, the focus is on structure, proportion and subtle lift — an acknowledgment that faces change, but do not need to be erased.
By the end of our visit, what lingered was not the promise of smoother skin, but the tone of the room: calm, methodical, almost clinical in its restraint. In a culture that often pushes extremes — more volume, more contour, more youth — Skinsplendid makes a quieter argument.
Aging is not the enemy. Gravity is simply a force to negotiate.
And sometimes, all it takes is a sprinkle.
