She hands the client the mirror and holds her breath.
It's in these moments that Chantal Crosse-Sumlin loves her work the most.
"When you hand someone the mirror and see the smile on their face, just the feeling that you've given them the confidence," she said, "that's what I love most about what I do."
It's a small ritual, repeated dozens of times a week at Aesthetica Health and Wellness, and it captures what her practice is built around: helping people feel like the best version of themselves.
Although it's apparent Chantal is in her element at Aesthetica, she didn't start her career in aesthetics.
While studying to become a nurse and family nurse practitioner at Columbus State University in the late '90s, she received a clinical placement in an underserved part of town. There, she discovered a passion for caring for patients who were uninsured, underinsured, or navigating low health literacy. She carried that work from Georgia to Northwest Arkansas in 2004, remaining in community health until COVID-19 arrived.
Things changed with the pandemic. Long shifts, quarantining from her family, and the emotional weight of losing patients left her searching for a different way to provide care.
"COVID really broke me as a provider," she admitted, and in the stillness of quarantine, she started asking herself what she actually wanted her career to look like.
The answer surprised her.
She'd long been interested in aesthetics and noticed a lack of providers who understood how to treat and honor a full range of skin tones and features.
In 2020, she left primary care to pursue it seriously, only to find herself missing the wellness side almost immediately. Rather than choose one, Chantal built a practice that could hold both.
Aesthetica now operates as a subscription-based concierge practice that combines direct primary care with medical aesthetics and wellness services. Patients have access to advanced skin rejuvenation, brow styling, medical-grade skincare, wrinkle relaxers, structural dermal fillers, collagen biostimulators, custom IV therapies, weight management, nutritional counseling, and bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. Members also receive same-day or next-day appointments, longer, unhurried visits tailored to their wellness goals, and direct access to their provider by phone, text, email, or telemedicine.
Like most things in life, however, getting here wasn't easy.
Chantal's first real office was a single rented suite in Rogers. But that was before the tornado.
This year, Aesthetica found its current home in Springdale, expanding its team and creating more room for patients. What Chantal didn't expect was how naturally her two client bases would merge.
"Once people come in and experience a service here, they seem to naturally flow to the others," she said. A weight-management client becomes a primary care patient; an injectables client discovers IV therapy.
Aesthetica's weight management program has become a point of pride for Chantal. She treats it as a partnership, starting with full labs and addressing the hormonal and genetic factors clients rarely hear about elsewhere. Together, they watch blood pressure and diabetes numbers improve as the weight comes off. Her advice to anyone starting out is simple: skip the all-or-nothing mindset and just do "a little bit more" than yesterday.
That same philosophy shows up in her approach to aesthetics.
"When aesthetics are done well," she said, "no one should be able to notice you've had any type of enhancement. Doing one little thing at a time, it should look natural."
Balance and proportion guide every appointment, honoring each client's natural features and helping explain Aesthetica's diverse clientele in Springdale.
As for what's next, Chantal isn't chasing multiple locations. She'd like to bring laser treatments in-house and help her new nurse injector build a practice of her own, but only in a way that keeps Aesthetica feeling the way it did in that first rented room: personal, unhurried, and built around the person in the chair.
For all that's changed, what matters most to Chantal is handing a client the mirror and watching them smile.
For all that's changed, what matters most to Chantal is handing a client the mirror and watching them smile.