Before-and-after photos in Australian dental advertising: what’s actually allowed

Two wrong answers circulate on this question. The first is “before-and-afters are illegal in Australia” — they are not. The second is “they’re fine as long as you have consent” — consent is necessary and nowhere near sufficient.

What Ahpra actually says

And then, specifically, two failure conditions. Advertising may be in breach if:

• it is not clear how the advertised treatment is responsible for, or has directly caused, the benefit shown in the image, or
• images are not genuine and/or have been edited or enhanced.

That is the whole test, and it is stricter than it sounds when you apply it to a real dental gallery.

Where dental galleries usually fail

If you are going to publish them anyway

Some cosmetic-focused practices reasonably decide the commercial case is worth the compliance work. If that is you, this is the standard to hold:

1. 1

   Standardise the capture

   Same camera, same lens, same distance, same lighting, same background, same head position, same expression. Photograph the “after” the way you photographed the “before”, not the way that flatters it.

2. 2

   Do not retouch. At all.

   No colour grading, no whitening, no smoothing, no cropping that changes what is visible. If the raw image is not persuasive, the case is not the one to publish.

3. 3

   State what was actually done

   Treatment performed, number of visits, over what period. This is what makes it clear the treatment caused the change rather than the photography.

4. 4

   State that results vary, and why

   Directly alongside the images, not in a footer. Include the factors that change the outcome for a different patient.

5. 5

   Include the risks

   Advertising should give accurate information about risks or potential risks of the treatment. A veneers gallery with no mention of irreversibility and enamel reduction is incomplete advertising, not just cautious advertising.

6. 6

   Show a representative range, not a highlight reel

   If every case you show is exceptional, the set as a whole creates an unreasonable expectation even when each image is genuine.

7. 7

   Get and record written consent

   Separate from the compliance question, this is a Privacy Act obligation. Consent should be specific about where the images will appear, and be withdrawable.

8. 8

   Keep the caption clinical, not emotional

   Describe the treatment. Do not narrate how the patient felt about it — that is a patient story, which Ahpra lists as a category that may create an unreasonable expectation of beneficial treatment.

Why we ship them off by default

Every dental website we build has before-and-after functionality available and switched off unless a practice explicitly asks for it and can meet the standard above. That is a deliberate default, for three reasons.

1. 1.The failure mode is silent. A non-compliant gallery does not break anything. It sits there converting perfectly well until someone complains, which is usually a competitor.
2. 2.It decays. A gallery that was compliant on launch collects a rushed phone snap two years later, added by someone who was not in the original conversation.
3. 3.It is rarely the bottleneck. In our experience the practices asking for a gallery are almost never losing patients because they lack one. They are losing them because nobody answered the enquiry that came in at 8pm.

What to show instead

The job a before-and-after does is “show me you can actually do this work”. There are lower-risk ways to do that job:

• Photograph the practice and the people. Real photos of your actual rooms, your actual team, your actual equipment. Most Australian dental sites use stock photography, so real photography is a genuine differentiator and carries none of this risk.
• Explain the process in detail. What happens at each visit, how long it takes, what it costs in total, what could go wrong. Specificity signals competence more reliably than a curated result.
• Publish qualifications and case volume as fact. “Dr Chen has placed over 400 implants” is a checkable statement about experience, not an outcome claim about a patient.
• Use a digital preview in the chair, not on the website. Smile-design mock-ups are a great consultation tool. They are a claim the moment they are advertising.

Are before-and-after photos banned in Australia?

No. They are conditional. Advertising may breach the National Law if it is not clear how the treatment caused the benefit shown, or if images are not genuine, edited or enhanced. Meeting those conditions is possible; most published galleries do not.

Does patient consent make a gallery compliant?

No. Consent addresses privacy, not advertising. A fully consented, retouched image is still an edited image, and a fully consented highlight reel still creates an unreasonable expectation of benefit.

What about before-and-afters on Instagram?

Same analysis. If the account promotes your practice it is advertising, and the requirements apply to all forms of public electronic communication that promote a regulated health service.

Can I show a before-and-after of my own teeth?

The rules attach to advertising a regulated health service, not to whose mouth is in the photo. A practitioner’s own case used to promote the practice is still a visual representation of an outcome, and Ahpra specifically flags anecdotes from the advertiser about personal benefit as a risk.