01Who is responsible for your data
The Face Clinic is operated in Lebanon. We are the data controller for everything described here.
For any question about your data, or to ask us to delete it, email hello@thefaceclinic.net.
This policy is written for clients in Lebanon and the MENA region, under Lebanese Law No. 81/2018 on Electronic Transactions and Personal Data. We do not currently market in any other region; if that changes, this policy will be extended before it does.
02What we collect, and when
Nothing is collected passively. Each item below is something you type or upload, at the moment you do it.
When you start an eligibility check, your first name, last name, email address and phone number. This is sent to our database when you press Continue, which is why the consent line sits above that button.
When you submit photographs, three facial photographs, your full name, your age, and what you have told us you would like to understand or improve.
After a specialist approves you and you pay, five further photographs, your ethnic background, and any relevant medical or aesthetic history you choose to give. We ask for these only at this point, deliberately: an unapproved stranger should not be handing over eight photographs of their face, and we should not be holding them.
A short video, only if you choose to send one, at the same stage you may record a clip of about ten seconds showing your face turning. It is optional, nothing is withheld if you skip it, and it is treated in every respect like a photograph: same private storage, same specialists, same retention periods, and it goes when everything else goes.
A health questionnaire, at the same stage, what medicines you take, conditions that change what is safe to recommend, and a few plain questions about how you feel about your appearance. It is the most sensitive thing we hold and it has a section of its own below.
If you message your specialist, the content of those messages.
Technical, your browser stores a small amount of data on your own device so the site works (an order in progress, whether you have visited before, and your login session). None of it is sent anywhere except to log you in. We do not use cookies for advertising or analytics.
03Health information, and why we ask for it
After you pay, we ask you to fill in a questionnaire about your health. This is the most sensitive information on this page, so this section says exactly what we ask, why we ask it, and what happens to it.
- What we ask. Whether you are pregnant, breastfeeding or planning a pregnancy. The medicines you take and anything you are allergic to. Skin conditions including cold sores, eczema, psoriasis, rosacea, melasma and vitiligo, and whether your skin scars thickly. Diabetes, thyroid problems, autoimmune conditions, bleeding disorders and epilepsy. Any pacemaker or metal implanted in your face. Previous radiotherapy, facial surgery or cosmetic treatments. Smoking, sleep and time in the sun. Your sex, and where your family is originally from.
- Why each one earns its place. Every question on that list changes what can safely be recommended to you. Several of the things a specialist would otherwise suggest are unsafe in pregnancy, or alongside certain medicines, or for skin that scars a particular way. Without the answers, a protocol is a guess with your safety inside it. If a question does not apply to you, it takes a second to answer and then it is done.
- Sex and family origin. Published facial measurements are reported separately for men and women, and most of them come from European and North American samples. Where research exists for this region, we use it instead. That is the only reason we ask, and it is why your protocol can tell you what it is comparing you against.
- How you feel about your appearance. A few plain questions, near the end. A specialist reads your answers themselves. There is no test and no score. We ask because this service sends you a written assessment of your own face, and that is not the right thing for everyone at every moment. If your answers suggest it is not right for you now, a specialist contacts you before anything is written.
- Who sees it. The specialists reviewing your case, and nobody else. The same rule that protects your photographs protects these answers, and it is enforced by the database rather than by the page.
- Never for marketing. Your health answers are never used to decide what email you are sent, and they are never sent to an advertising platform, an analytics tool, or any other company. That is true whatever you have switched on in your account.
- Answering is your choice. You can leave questions blank. We would rather you did that than guess. But a specialist may pause your case and ask, because there are answers we cannot safely proceed without.
We hold this information because you gave it to us for this purpose, and for no other. You can withdraw that at any time by asking us to delete your data, which is covered below.
04What we do not do
This is the shortest section and the one worth reading.
- No analytics. There is no Google Analytics, no Meta pixel, no tracking script of any kind on this site. The only third-party code we load is the database client we use to talk to our own database.
- No advertising platforms. Your photographs, your answers and your results are never sent to an advertising or analytics platform. Not in aggregate, not anonymised, not ever.
- No selling or sharing. We do not sell your data and we do not share it with anyone for their own purposes.
- No training. Your photographs are not used to train models.
- No public gallery. Your photographs are never published, shown as an example, or used in marketing.
- No silent camera. If you use the in-page camera with the oval guide, your browser asks you first, the live preview never leaves your phone, and nothing is sent anywhere until you press the button that takes the photograph and then choose to submit it. Close the page and the camera is released. While the guide is running, a face detector works on the picture your camera is showing so the outline can tell you to move closer or straighten up. That detector is our own copy, served from this site, and it runs entirely on your phone. It sends nothing anywhere, and it is the reason the guide can react without any image leaving your device.
What we do do is send marketing email to people who have asked for it. That is the next section, and it is opt-in only.
Three companies see limited data as a consequence of the site working, and none of them receives your photographs or your answers. Cloudflare hosts the site and therefore sees your IP address. Google Fonts serves the typeface and also sees your IP address. Resend delivers our email, so it handles your email address and the contents of messages we send you about your case. Our database and file storage are run by Supabase, on servers in Ireland. These are processors: they act on our instructions and may not use your data for anything of their own.
05Who can see your photographs
Your photographs live in a private storage bucket. They are not on a public URL and cannot be reached by guessing an address.
Access is restricted in the database itself, not just in the interface: you can read your own, and a specialist can read those belonging to cases they review. Someone who obtained the site’s public code could not use it to read anyone else’s photographs, because the rule that stops them is enforced by the database, not by the page.
Emails we send you about your case may contain links to your own photographs. Those links expire after twenty-four hours.
06How long we keep it
These are not aspirations. Each one runs on a schedule.
- An abandoned eligibility check, if you upload photographs and never confirm your email address, the account and the photographs are deleted automatically within the hour.
- Photographs that belong to nobody, files left behind by an interrupted upload are swept hourly.
- An active client, we keep your photographs and your analysis for as long as your subscription is active. This is what lets a specialist compare this year against last year, which is the point of an annual assessment.
- After you cancel, twelve months, then automatic deletion. That window exists so that resubscribing within a year does not mean starting from nothing.
- If you ask us to delete sooner, see the next section. That always takes priority.
07Marketing email
We send occasional email about the clinic, new findings, what we have learned, sometimes an offer. Only if you ticked the box asking for it. The tick is separate from agreeing to the terms, it is never pre-ticked, and nothing about the service depends on it.
If you never ticked it, you are not on the list. Everyone who signed up before this page existed was told we ran no marketing lists, so they were not added to one. The only way onto the list is to ask.
Stopping it takes one click. Every marketing email carries an unsubscribe link that works without logging in, and it takes effect immediately. Clients can also turn it off in their account. Once you are off, you stay off, filling in a form again later does not quietly put you back.
This is separate from email about your own case. Your eligibility answer, your analysis and replies from your specialist are the service you bought, not promotion, and they are not affected by unsubscribing.
08Using your analysis to personalise that email
This is the one worth reading twice, because it is the most sensitive thing on this page.
If you allow it, we may use what your analysis found, the measurements taken and what your specialist recommended, to decide what we send you, so that an email about skin is not sent to someone whose protocol was about proportion.
It is off unless you turn it on, and it is a separate switch from marketing email itself, in your account. We do not ask for it at signup, because at that point you have no analysis and there would be nothing to agree to. We ask once there is.
Turning off marketing email turns this off with it. Your photographs and your health answers are never used this way, only the written findings, and only inside our own system: nothing about your analysis is ever sent to an advertising platform, an analytics tool, or any other company. That does not change whatever you decide here.
09Deleting your data
You can ask us to delete everything we hold about you, at any time, whether or not you have paid us, and whether or not your subscription is active. Email hello@thefaceclinic.net from the address on your account.
We will remove your account, your photographs, any video you sent, your questionnaire answers, your messages and your analysis. We aim to complete this within thirty days and usually much sooner.
One thing we keep: where you have paid us, Lebanese tax and accounting law requires us to retain a record of the transaction, the amount, the date and the name it was billed to. That record contains no photographs, no answers and no analysis. We keep it for as long as the law requires and no longer.
Deleting your data ends the service. We cannot analyse photographs we no longer have.
10Your rights
You can ask us to show you everything we hold about you, correct anything that is wrong, delete it, or stop using it. Email hello@thefaceclinic.net and we will answer.
You gave us your health answers for one purpose, and you can take that back. Tell us and we stop using them, which in practice means we stop writing your protocol and ask you what you would like to happen next. It does not have to be all or nothing, and it does not have to mean deleting your account.
You do not need a reason and we will not ask you for one.
11Where your data is stored
Our database, file storage and authentication run on a secure database in Ireland.
This means your data is processed outside Lebanon through a secure foreign provider. Running our own servers and processing data locally would be less safe.
12Security
Photographs are stored privately, access is enforced at the database level, and every connection to this site is encrypted. Staff access is limited to the specialists who review cases.
What we will not tell you is that this makes it impossible for anything to go wrong. No one can promise that. If a breach ever affects your data, we will tell you what happened and what we are doing about it, in plain language, without waiting to be asked.
13Changes to this policy
If we change how we handle your data in a way that matters, we will email clients before the change takes effect rather than quietly updating this page. The date at the top always reflects the current version.