The Pearl Med Spa founder Kim Welch isn’t your typical aesthetic nurse. She approaches aesthetics in an innovative and holistic manner, taking careful consideration into facial balancing, movements, mobility and long-term planning. The result is patients trusting her with their faces and their fears.

With offices in Southlake and Coppell, Welch also plans to expand into Fort Worth. She enlisted Designs by Susan Gage to help her curate The Pearl’s chic offices, and the finished space exudes a welcoming warmth.

Upon entering, Welch radiates the same kind of calm, grounded in decades of hands-on experience and a life story marked by resilience and an unshakable belief in doing what is right over what is easy.

“I’ve been a nurse for 31 years,” she says, smiling. “I’ve done everything — ER, transplants, school nursing, home health. I tell young nurses, don’t assume you have to walk one perfect path. Be open.

”That openness eventually led her into aesthetic medicine nearly twenty years ago, long before injectables were commonplace, and Botox dominated the market.

“What I have seen in the last 20 years is expansive,” she says. “Aesthetics is one of the fastest-growing places in medicine. It’s unbelievable.”

Safety and Science

As the field exploded, however, Welch began to notice a troubling shift. The cosmetic changes patients were requesting grew increasingly extreme, driven by social media rather than science.

“Patients will come in and say, ‘I saw a commercial for Botox and want it in my cheeks.’ That’s not how it works,” she explains. “In aesthetic medicine, a medically trained professional develops the treatment plan for patients to achieve a desired result. We are the curators because we have the medical training necessary to make those choices.

”Her approach is both personalized and deeply principled.

“It is a slippery slope if you’re not careful,” she says. “If the patient can’t see it, we have taken an oath to do no harm. Just because it’s a cash-pay business doesn’t give you the right to do the wrong thing.

”Her philosophy is simple: provide tasteful, strategic, anatomy-based care that restores rather than distorts.

“It’s expensive to look natural,” she jokes, “but it’s worth it.”

Education over Ego

A consultation with her looks nothing like the rapid-fire transactions aesthetic medicine has become known for.

“I hand them a mirror and ask, ‘What brings you in today?’” she explains. “Following up with my million-dollar question: Is it okay if I share what I know about facial aging? And the answer is always yes.”

Using flip charts that illustrate changes in skin quality, fat pad depletion, and bone loss across each decade, she helps patients understand not just what is changing — but why it’s happening.

“They think their lips aged because they didn’t use enough lip balm,” she says with a sympathetic shake of her head. “It’s so much bigger than that — collagen loss, fat repositioning, bone changes. You didn’t do anything wrong. This is just life.”

With this information, she can construct fully customized treatment plans for patients that maximize results.

“Our job is to educate, not sell. Belief determines behavior. If you believe what you’re doing is good for your patients, the rest falls into place.”

Navigating Trends Without Losing Integrity

In a world of “pillow faces” and overfilled celebrities, Welch knows exactly how those can extremes happen, and how to prevent them.

“That’s what occurs when providers don’t understand facial balancing or don’t manage expectations,” she says. “If a patient comes in at 50 asking for a 20-year-old lip, it just doesn’t work.”

At The Pearl Med Spa the providers look like the results they deliver.

“The biggest scare is when a patient sits down and the provider looks overdone,” she says candidly. “It’s important that the provider and the patient are on the same page before moving forward with any treatment.”

She hires intentionally and trains relentlessly, bringing staff to aesthetic medicince conferences across Europe to study different cultural approaches to aging.

A Diagnosis That Changed Everything

Just as her business was thriving, her life unraveled in ways no one could have anticipated.

In late 2020, already in the isolation of the pandemic, Welch discovered a lump in her breast. By the time she received her diagnosis, her father was hospitalized with COVID. Two weeks later, he passed away. The day after his funeral, she started chemotherapy.

Welch struggled to find the meaning in the cards she’d been dealt.

“You took my dad, you gave me cancer, you stole my house,” she remembers thinking, after her home later flooded during the infamous Texas freeze in winter 2021. “I was so mad. I didn’t want to hear about what I’d learn in the future. I was just mad.”

She continued to work and see patients through it all.

“I’d put on my hair and my lashes and pretend I was fine,” she says. “I’d walk into each patient appointment thinking, ‘Hi, I’m gonna make you pretty,’ while feeling like I looked the ugliest I’d ever looked.”

The treatment was grueling — six months of “the red devil,” followed by surgery and daily radiation.

Now on the other side of cancer, Welch is able to make a bit more sense of the past several years, remarking that she is thankful for cancer for giving her empathy and for showing her she can survive hard things.

“Cancer made me intentional,” she says. “I’m more alive than I ever was before.”

The Evolving Mission: Wellness, Regeneration & Whole-Patient Care

Her cancer journey deepened her belief that true beauty is cellular, not superficial.

“I don’t want to be just cheeks, lips, and chins,” she says of her practice’s focus. “We want to talk about regenerative health and functional wellness. Patients need providers they trust to help them navigate peptides, labs, metabolism, inflammation — all of it.”

Her wellness program prioritizes accountability and evidence over trends.

“I want you to have a place where your questions get answered,” she says. “Where we’re looking at your labs, your muscle mass, your hydration, everything holistically. People need good people to guide them.”

A Holistic Approach

To provide effective care, Welch looks beyond her patients’ faces to consider the whole person.

“Self-care isn’t vanity. You get up, you get dressed, you brush your teeth — why is taking care of your skin or collagen any different? You are your most valuable possession,” she says. “I just want people to feel like their best selves. That’s what this is all about.”