KORA Aesthetics is a single-room, appointment-only medical spa in Scottsdale, Arizona. Every treatment is performed by a board-certified nurse practitioner — never delegated to a technician, and never rushed to fit a shorter appointment slot.
Our founder, Katie Manhardt, MSN, FNP-C, is a national clinical trainer for Galderma and Prollenium, which means she teaches injection technique and facial anatomy to other medical professionals across the country. The product in the vial is the same everywhere. Who assesses your face, and where they place it, is not.
Two providers, both nurse practitioners. You will meet whoever treats you at consultation and see the same person at every appointment afterwards.
Founder & Nurse Practitioner · MSN, FNP-C
Board-certified family nurse practitioner and founder of KORA Aesthetics in Scottsdale. Katie is a national clinical trainer for Galderma and Prollenium — selected to…
View profile →Nurse Practitioner · NP
REPLACE BEFORE PUBLISHING — two or three sentence public summary for Team grids and treatment pages. Confirm Victoria's exact licence type and certifications before…
View profile →KORA takes its name from khôra, a term Plato used in the Timaeus for the receptacle — the space in which things come into being. It is not a word about beauty. It is a word about the interval between what something is and what it is becoming.
That is a deliberately unglamorous idea for an aesthetics practice, and it is the right one. Most of what we do is not transformation. It is small, considered adjustment — restoring the proportion a face has gradually lost, or softening a line without removing the expression that made it. The goal is never that someone notices what you had done. It is that they cannot work out why you look well.
The practice was founded on the conviction that this work belongs in medical hands. Injectables are prescription drugs placed in close proximity to blood vessels and nerves. Treating them as a beauty service, rather than a medical one, is how patients end up with results they did not ask for and complications nobody recognised in time.
To give people in Scottsdale and Paradise Valley an aesthetics practice where the person holding the syringe is qualified to hold it, the pricing is published before you sit down, and the honest answer is sometimes that you do not need the treatment you came in asking for.
We would rather lose a booking than place product that will not suit you. That happens most weeks, and it is the part of the practice we are most proud of.
Most aesthetic medicine is sold by the area. A syringe for the cheeks, units for the forehead, something else for the lips — each treated as a separate complaint with a separate solution. Faces do not work that way, and treating them that way is how people end up looking treated.
We assess the face as one structure, working outward from the midline. Proportion, projection, symmetry and how the light falls across it. Very often the visible problem is a plane or two away from where a patient would point: a flattened cheek deepens the fold beneath it, a chin set slightly back makes lips look overfilled when they are not, and hollow temples make a brow read heavy.
The practical consequence is that we usually use less product than patients expect. One syringe placed correctly beats three placed hopefully. We under-correct on a first visit by default and review at two weeks, because product can always be added and cannot always be taken away.
Every injectable appointment at KORA is performed by Katie Manhardt, MSN, FNP-C or Victoria Patterson, NP. Nothing is delegated to a technician. Filler carries genuine vascular risk and hyaluronidase is kept on site at every appointment.
Botox is $13 a unit and it says so on the website. We map your treatment, tell you the total, and open nothing until you have agreed to it. No packages designed to obscure how much product you are receiving.
If your concern is skin laxity rather than volume loss, filler will make it worse. If your hair follicles are gone rather than thinning, PRF will not bring them back. We say so, and refer where a surgeon or dermatologist is the better answer.
We would rather add at your complimentary two-week review than take away on day one. It means a slower path to your result and a far lower chance of one you regret.
A significant part of our work is dissolving and correcting filler placed elsewhere. You need no records, no receipts and no explanation. Nobody here will comment on where you had it done.
No walk-ins and no overlapping appointments. Your treatment starts when it is meant to, you are never in a shared waiting room, and nobody is rushing to the next chair.
Thirty minutes, complimentary, and no obligation. A full facial assessment, your treatment mapped and quoted upfront, and an honest answer — including when the answer is to do nothing yet.