Online skincare consultations in the UK, compared honestly (2026)

Skin + Me is the biggest name in UK teledermatology subscriptions. It describes itself as a digital health business “where we diagnose skin at a distance”: you complete a free online consultation, and prescribers — the service is built in partnership with UK consultant dermatologists and pharmacist independent prescribers — put prescription-strength actives such as tretinoin, clindamycin and azelaic acid into one personalised cream, the Daily Doser, posted every 28 days and reformulated as your skin adapts.

The real price is £29.99 every 28 days, ongoing. The advertised £4.99 first month applies only with a promo code, and even then a £4.99 pharmacy fee applies, so treat £29.99 as the number to budget for. Optional add-ons (cleanser and moisturiser £29.99, SPF50 £19.99, serum £19.99, each every eight weeks) take the total well beyond the headline if you want the full routine. You can cancel anytime in your account.

What it offers is real: genuine prescription dermatology with ongoing clinical support at a fraction of private-clinic prices, and by far the biggest review base of any service on this page. The structural limit is the one shared by every formula subscription: everything ends in its own compounded product. Skin + Me will never tell you which cleanser, sunscreen or serum to buy from anyone else.

Dermatica does the same fundamental thing as Skin + Me — a custom prescription formula after an online consultation — at a lower price. Its formulas are prescribed through Central Medical Solutions Ltd, a CQC-regulated provider, dispensed by MedExpress pharmacy, and come with unlimited free dermatology check-ins and formula adjustments.

It is the cheapest prescription-strength route in the UK: £2.90 for the first month (promoted from £24.99), then £24.99 per 28 days, and prepaying brings it lower still: four months for £84, six for £119, or twelve for £224, which works out around £18.67 a bottle. Its own Essentials range (cleansers, moisturisers, SPF) runs £5.95–£30, and you can pause, reschedule or cancel online at any time.

The trade-off is the same as its rivals’: the service exists to prescribe its own bottle, so you won’t get advice across other brands. But if your skin needs tretinoin-class treatment on a budget, nothing on this page beats the price.

Klira calls itself “the dermatology clinic of the future” and is the most clinic-like of the three formula subscriptions. It was founded and is clinically led by consultant dermatologist Dr Emma Craythorne, and its bespoke formula, “The Klira Special”, draws on prescription actives including tretinoin, hydroquinone and ivermectin.

It is also the most expensive: £75 a month on the rolling monthly plan (minimum one-month agreement), £69 a month billed quarterly, or £59 a month on the annual plan, a 12-month commitment that includes a 90-day video consultation Klira values at £100. Every plan is subject to consultation: you’re accepted after assessment, not at checkout. One gap worth knowing before you sign: cancellation terms beyond those stated commitment periods aren’t published, so ask first.

The premium buys clinical leadership with a public name attached, and the closest thing to an ongoing clinic relationship a formula subscription offers. As with Skin + Me and Dermatica, it does not buy advice about anything beyond its own formula.

Boots Online Doctor is the no-subscription option among the prescription routes: a pay-per-treatment service covering acne, eczema, rosacea, psoriasis, ageing and hyperpigmentation, and skin infections, with a separate £25 Skin Condition Diagnosis photo assessment (which, note, does not assess moles). A clinician reviews your photo questionnaire within 24 hours, and if the treatment you’ve requested isn’t appropriate, you get a refund or an alternative.

There’s no consultation fee; you pay per item for standard branded treatments — Skinoren 50g at £19, Differin 0.1% 50g at £28, Aklief at £55, with acne bundles from £53 to £78 — with free standard delivery or collection from a store. That per-item clarity, plus the refund-or-alternative policy, is high-street trust in practice.

What it doesn’t do: custom formulas, cosmetic routine advice, or severe acne, which it directs to a GP. And read its Trustpilot score as a service-wide signal, because it covers the whole Online Doctor service rather than skin treatment alone.

GetHarley describes itself as “the first telehealth platform connecting individuals to experienced practitioners for a personalised discovery of products and treatments”, with a network of over 1,000 aesthetic doctors, plastic surgeons and dermatologists. You book a one-off video consultation with a specific practitioner and come away with a plan of typically three to four “medical grade” products.

Two things to know about the money. First, consultation fees aren’t published on the site: the fee varies by practitioner and is shown at booking, so you won’t know the price until you choose a clinician. Second, the products in your plan are supplied and sold by GetHarley itself — its terms make clear the practitioners are not its employees or agents, and selling the recommended products is part of how the platform earns. You get one free reschedule with 48 hours’ notice and a 14-day cooling-off period.

The genuine strength is access: this is the most direct one-off route on this page to senior UK skin specialists, including consultant dermatologists, without joining anything, and the plans span multiple professional brands rather than one house formula. Weigh the plan knowing the platform profits from it, and note that no prescribing is promised on its public site.

Yes, the consultation is genuinely free: Face Dr is an online skincare clinic offering 30-minute video consultations with a named skin expert, and in its own words there is “no obligation to buy from us”. After the call, your recommendations are loaded to your account to purchase: clinical-grade brands such as ZO, Obagi, SkinCeuticals and Medik8, typically in the region of £40–£240+ per product (exact prices sit behind the account login).

The structure is worth stating plainly, because it is the whole deal: the consultation is free because Face Dr is also the shop. It is an authorised stockist of the professional brands it recommends, it isn’t a prescribing service, and there’s no subscription. Free time with a named expert is a real offer; just go in knowing the adviser and the retailer are the same business, and that its review base is small at 39 reviews.

Renude is the nearest neighbour we have, so it deserves the straightest description on the page. It offers a £20 photo consultation or a £35 30-minute video consultation with a qualified aesthetician — ten-plus years’ experience, with qualifications such as NVQ Level 3, CIDESCO or CIBTAC — and both include two weeks of follow-up messaging. It’s pay-as-you-go with no subscription, and its recommendations genuinely span brands: SVR, Medik8, Avène, Bioderma, iS Clinical, COSRX, Eucerin, CeraVe and others. Its own claim: “We’re not affiliated with any brands and our team don’t work on commission, so you can trust that you’re getting unbiased skincare advice.”

On the substance, that claim holds up where it counts: Renude doesn’t sell products and doesn’t take commission, which makes it the cheapest independent human advice in the UK. The two-week follow-up window is real value too, because the questions usually arrive after you’ve started.

The factual differences from a clinical service, and from us: its advisers are aestheticians rather than clinicians; it doesn’t prescribe; your advice arrives as a consultation and a routine in a dashboard rather than a written report; and the wider company also sells services to skincare brands and retailers, a side of the business its homepage now leads with. None of that undoes the consumer offer — it’s context for the word “independent”. The real decision between Renude and us is conversation versus report, and we set it out plainly further down.

The Ordinary’s Regimen Builder is free, asks about your skin type, top three concerns and pregnancy status, and builds a routine exclusively from The Ordinary’s own products (the brand is owned by DECIEM). CeraVe’s Find Your Routine, billed as a dermatologist-developed routine finder, does the same job for CeraVe (owned by L’Oréal). Both are instant, and nobody asks for your card.

The structure to understand: a brand quiz is a marketing funnel for that brand’s catalogue. The recommendations never leave the brand, and no human reviews your answers. That isn’t deception, it’s the design — and as a free way to navigate a catalogue you already like, these quizzes are perfectly reasonable. What they structurally cannot do is tell you when a different brand’s product would suit your skin better.

Three other names come up often. The Skin Nerd runs consultations from around £50 but sells skincare, including its own Skingredients range, so it doesn’t meet the independence test this page applies. Skin Rocks’ routine builder is a retail funnel built around curated products and its own range. And Lion/ne, once a well-known independent consultation service, is no longer operating at its former domain.

For medical skin disease, the NHS is the gold standard and it’s free: consultant-led dermatology, reached by a GP referral through the e-Referral Service (you can’t refer yourself). This is the right route — often the only right route — for severe acne that may need isotretinoin, for suspicious or changing lesions, and for anything your GP thinks needs a specialist. What a GP won’t do is refer you for routine skincare or product advice.

Be realistic about the wait. In the latest published NHS England figures (May 2026, the most recent available when we checked), around 385,000 dermatology pathways were waiting; the median wait was around 11 weeks; and 67.2% of patients were seen within 18 weeks against a 92% standard, meaning roughly a third waited longer than that, with the slowest 8% waiting more than 38 weeks and around 4,400 people waiting over a year. Eighteen weeks is a standard the NHS is currently missing, not a guarantee. Suspected skin cancer is different: an urgent two-week referral pathway.

If you’re on that list now, keep the referral and look after your skin safely in the meantime — we’ve written a separate guide on what you can safely do while waiting for NHS dermatology.

The Skin Adviser (that’s us) sells one thing: a written consultation for £15, one-off. You answer detailed questions about your skin, and the consultation comes back as a report: an analysis of what’s going on, morning and evening routines, and specific products chosen from a database of 11,929 products across 607 brands, checked against current UK retailer listings so prices are real and products are in stock. Every recommendation cites published dermatology references and comes with alternatives at different prices. The full method is public on our methodology page, and you can read a complete sample consultation before paying anything.

What we don’t do, stated as plainly as we’ve stated everyone else’s limits: we don’t prescribe — no tretinoin, no hydroquinone; there’s no video call and no ongoing clinician relationship; and we don’t diagnose. Where prescription-strength treatment is genuinely the right route, your consultation says so and points you to your GP or to services like the ones above. We’re also newer than every established name on this page, with nothing like their review bases.

The money, because it’s the point: your fee is our only revenue. No commissions, no affiliate links, no sponsorships, no brand payments — when your consultation links to a product, we earn nothing if you buy it. That’s the entire reason the recommendations can go wherever the evidence points.

A page like this is only as honest as its gaps. Where a fact couldn’t be verified from a provider’s own published pages, we left it out rather than repeat it. Here is what that covers, so you know what’s missing:

• GetHarley’s consultation fee isn’t published; it varies by practitioner and is shown at booking. We haven’t quoted a figure because we couldn’t verify one.
• Klira’s cancellation terms beyond its stated minimum commitments aren’t published, so we haven’t described them.
• Face Dr’s exact product prices sit behind an account login; roughly £40–£240+ is the closest verifiable range.
• Skin + Me’s £4.99 first month could only be verified as a promo-code offer, with a £4.99 pharmacy fee still applying, so we treat £29.99 per 28 days as the real price.
• Boots Online Doctor’s Trustpilot rating covers its whole Online Doctor service; a skin-only rating isn’t published.
• NHS waiting-time data for June 2026 hadn’t been published when we checked on 11 August 2026; the figures above are May 2026, the latest available.