Cosmetic injections: doctors ask parliament for a ban outside medicine, beauty centres demand the files
On 23 July, Tunisia's aesthetic doctors' union handed parliament's health commission a draft law to criminalize cosmetic injections by anyone who is not a doctor, after months of warnings about disfiguring products bought online. On 17 August, the national chamber of beauty centres answered on Diwan FM: show us the files on the clients said to have been harmed, and stop accusing the whole trade. Where the union wants the question settled wholesale, by reserving the needle to doctors, the chamber wants it settled case by case, on proof. The ministry and the deputies each propose their own instrument.
Where they agree
Even the chamber signs up to sanctions: Bouguerra commits the beauty trade to the immediate closure of any centre proven to have harmed a client. And three of the page's four organizations want new written rules: the union a criminal law to replace the 1991 texts its vice-president calls obsolete, the ministry its cahier des charges, the deputies a framework negotiated with every party.
Where they split
For the union, injections belong to doctors alone: Ben Fredj wants the law to reserve the practice to them, and Chabboub recalls that an unqualified hand piercing the skin is already practising medicine illegally. Bouguerra refuses the collective verdict and asks for cases: a precise file, an established violation, then closure. The instrument divides the union, the ministry and the deputies: the union asks parliament for a criminal law, the ministry answers with a cahier des charges no one has dated, and the deputies want the frame negotiated with every party rather than written by one profession against another.
What nobody is saying
The union speaks of disfigurements and the chamber of cancelled bookings, but no voice gives a count of complications recorded, of centres inspected, or of prosecutions brought under the texts in force since 1991; the argument over proof runs on cases neither side has laid on the table.
She told the deputies that people with no licence at all sell injections on social networks at abnormally low prices, usurping the title of doctor. The products carry no traceability and no health-ministry validation, and the complications they cause run to irreversible disfigurement and major physical handicap. Her union wants legislation that reserves aesthetic practice to qualified doctors, criminalizes the clandestine trade and puts the import of injectable products under strict control.
”Les patients subissent des injections de produits d’origine totalement inconnue, qui sont sans traçabilité et ne sont pas validés par le ministère de la Santé !”Patients are being injected with products of totally unknown origin, with no traceability and no validation by the Ministry of Health!
She asks the doctors' union for precise files on the clients said to have been left with damage or deformities, instead of accusations against the whole trade, and offers a joint working session under the employers' organization. She commits the profession to backing severe sanctions when a violation is established, up to the immediate closure of the centre. The media campaign running since the start of 2026 has, she says, cost investment, bookings and training in a sector that employs thousands, and she contests the union's change of position on letting legally operating centres recruit doctors to perform the injections themselves.
”campagne médiatique sans précédent”an unprecedented media campaign
Tunisian law is already unequivocal, she recalls: any act that pierces the skin, performed by an unqualified person, is illegal practice of medicine, punishable by prison. But the texts date from 1991, and her union judges them obsolete in a digital era where Botox, in principle prescription-only and subject to health-ministry authorization, is sold freely online. The complications she listed in May 2026 run from burns and indelible scars to anaphylactic shock that kills without immediate medical care. She wants online surveillance stepped up, the clandestine centres dismantled, and clients checking their practitioner against the medical council's lists.
During the hearing, deputies pushed back against the image of a luxury trade: aesthetic medicine also repairs congenital malformations and accident damage, and is not the preserve of the well-off. They want a legal framework sped up, but written after consulting every party involved, with the Health Ministry keeping its role of detecting violations and pursuing their authors. One deputy proposed that the ministry publish a periodic list of legally operating clinics and centres; other speakers would hand part of the checks to the national food-safety authority.
The ministry's route is regulatory rather than penal: it has committed to a cahier des charges defining the conditions for practising aesthetic medicine and the premises where those acts may be performed. Back in January 2026, at a session on dermatology chaired by health minister Mustapha Ferjani, the participants had already stressed, in the ministry's own account, the need for a firm response to illegal and anarchic practices in aesthetic medicine and for faster publication of the cahier des charges for laser-treatment centres. Neither text has a date.