Cover At The Urban Clinic, the conversation has always been about something more interesting: helping you look like yourself—but at your most alive, most assured and most fully present
At The Urban Clinic, the conversation has always been about something more interesting: helping you look like yourself—but at your most alive, most assured and most fully present
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Aesthetics has spent decades chasing youth. At The Urban Clinic, the conversation has always been about something more interesting: helping you look like yourself—but at your most alive, most assured and most fully present
Dr Xu Yanni has a question she has been asking since long before the rest of the industry thought to raise it. Not: how do we make this patient look younger? But: how do we help her look as well as she feels? It is a distinction that sounds simple. In practice, it changes everything.
The founder of The Urban Clinic—which marks its 10th anniversary this year—has never believed aesthetics is about vanity. It is, in her view, a reflection of wellbeing, self-respect and readiness for the life ahead. Each decade—the 40s, the 50s, the 60s and beyond—not a slow retreat from what came before, but a meaningful new chapter worth showing up to well. That belief is the foundation everything else rests on.
Before Dr Xu opened The Urban Clinic, she made a private promise to herself. She wanted to be running her own clinic by the time her firstborn son Ethan turned one. It was not simply ambition. It was, she says, a question of design—a deliberate act of building the kind of working environment she actually believed in, one where flexibility, family, and professional growth were not competing priorities but coexisting ones.
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Above Dr Yanni Xu, founder of The Urban Clinic
Dr Yanni Xu, founder of The Urban Clinic
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The promise was kept. Dr Xu—a graduate of King’s College London who received the Todd Award for achieving one of the highest scores in her cohort, and who began her career as a clinician-scientist in obstetrics and gynaecology at SingHealth—left a well-mapped trajectory not out of disillusionment, but out of vision. She wanted to practise medicine on her own terms, answerable to her patients rather than to a system.
Founding partnership
Above Dr Emma Xu
Above Dr Tsu Boon Hsiung
Dr Emma Xu
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Ask Dr Xu how she describes herself professionally, and she will tell you she is a systems person. She thinks in frameworks, builds processes, asks how things scale. It is a sensibility shaped by years of clinical structure, and it remains the organisational backbone of everything The Urban Clinic does.
Her sister Dr Emma Xu and Dr Tsu Boon Hsiung are co-architects of everything The Urban Clinic has become. Between them, they bring decades of accumulated clinical relationship with patients who have trusted them across life’s significant chapters — pregnancies, career changes, the quiet passages of midlife. Both are recognised beyond the clinic’s walls: sought-after key opinion leaders and trainers for global aesthetic companies, representing The Urban Clinic at regional and international platforms, and bringing that knowledge back into every consultation. “Emma and Boon Hsiung are not just my partners,” Dr Xu says. “They are the reason patients come back. The continuity, the depth of knowing—that lives with them.” The identity of TUC is inseparable from them.
The Evidence Standard
Above The team of doctors at The Urban Clinic. Clockwise from top left: Dr Xu Rong Rong, Dr Byron Tee, Dr Tsu Boon Hsiung, Dr Xu Yanni, Dr Emma Xu and Dr Ian Tan
The team of doctors at The Urban Clinic. Clockwise from top left: Dr Xu Rong Rong, Dr Byron Tee, Dr Tsu Boon Hsiung, Dr Xu Yanni, Dr Emma Xu and Dr Ian Tan
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The Urban Clinic’s clinical work is organised around three core areas: acne and rosacea, pigmentation, and anti-ageing. What distinguishes the approach within each is not simply the range of treatments available, but the discipline applied before introducing them.
“We do not follow trends,” Dr Ian Tan says. “We test them, question them, and then—if they hold up—we adopt them with intention.” The Urban Clinic was among the first three clinics in Asia to trial Ultherapy Prime as part of an early experience programme in APAC—a distinction that reflects both its standing among global device companies and its commitment to clinical scrutiny before patient recommendation.
Dr Tan leads the clinic’s clinical research pipeline—a forward-looking function that rigorously evaluates emerging technologies before recommending them to patients. The clinic has completed its clinical evaluation of two innovations that remain unavailable at most centres in Singapore: a cold fibre fractional laser for acne scar resurfacing, and a sebum-reducing laser that targets active acne without medication—both now integrated into the clinic’s treatment offerings. “We move deliberately,” Dr Tan says. “By the time a treatment reaches our patients, the question of whether it is ready and effective has already been answered.”
The same rigour governs how the clinic approaches the evolving generation of injectables. According to Dr Xu Rong Rong, biostimulators—focused on regenerating the skin’s own collagen over time—and structural fillers, deployed with deliberate restraint to support rather than augment, are used as part of a regenerative approach that works with the body’s biology rather than against it.
Beyond correction
Above The Urban Clinic’s signature clinical approach is multilayer, multi-modality aesthetic medicine
The Urban Clinic’s signature clinical approach is multilayer, multi-modality aesthetic medicine
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According to Dr Byron Tee, The Urban Clinic’s signature clinical approach is multilayer, multi-modality aesthetic medicine—the strategic combination of lasers, injectables, biostimulators, skin boosters and skin care within a structured, sequential programme rather than addressing each concern in isolation.
The framework follows four principles: assess, anchor, add, advance. It begins with a clear picture of each patient’s structural and skin-quality concerns, addresses the foundational architecture of the face, and layers refinements from there. The approach is built on a principle the clinic has long held: that the most intelligent aesthetic medicine is preventive rather than reactive. A patient who begins a considered programme in her early 40s, addressing foundational concerns before they compound, will age differently—and more gracefully—than one who seeks correction a decade later. The goal throughout is not to look treated. It is to look like oneself—better rested, more vital, more at ease.
What’s next
The question that shaped the clinic’s next decade did not come from a conference or a product launch. It came from sitting still during the pandemic and asking something Dr Xu had not previously had the quiet to ask: what is the purpose of aesthetics if we are not, in any broader sense, living well?
Skin, she came to understand, is not separate from the body. It reflects sleep quality, metabolic health, hormonal state, stress load, and biological age. If aesthetic outcomes are to be genuinely excellent and durable, the patient must be seen whole—not as a face presenting isolated concerns. “The first revolution extended how long we live,” Dr Xu says. “The second is about how well. That's the work now.”
That conviction became The Longevity GP, the second clinic Dr Xu founded to bring aesthetic medicine and longevity medicine together as a single continuum of care. It is the chapter she describes as closest to her heart, and the natural destination of everything The Urban Clinic has been building towards for a decade.
As the clinic enters its tenth year, the anniversary campaign—running from end July through early September — is built squarely around this idea. “‘Looking well as you live well’ is not a tagline,” Dr Xu says. “It is a clinical philosophy.” On August 13 this year, the milestone will be marked with an invitation-only celebration bringing together patients, partners, and collaborators for an evening of conversation and connection with the clinic’s doctors.
Ten years in, The Urban Clinic is less interested in changing faces—and more interested in helping people look aligned with the vitality, confidence, and possibilities of the life ahead.
To mark a decade of considered medicine, The Urban Clinic is welcoming new patients for a skin consultation with one of its doctors throughout the anniversary period. The 10th anniversary celebration takes place on August 13—an invitation-only evening for patients, partners, and friends of the clinic. To arrange a consultation or enquire about the evening, visit The Urban Clinic’s website, contact the team at 6254 0419, or WhatsApp 9199 4097.
Click through the gallery below to see the team of doctors at The Urban Clinic
Dr Emma Xu
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Andrea Saadan is the Senior Digital Editor of Tatler Singapore. She oversees all digital content for the website and currently leads the Beauty and Lifestyle verticals. As a child, she had always enjoyed reading and writing but it was only after she joined her college newspaper, The Spectrum, in Buffalo, New York, that she considered a career in journalism. Her love for all things beauty started from the age of two—when she was caught playing with (and damaging) her mother’s YSL lipstick. On top of her day job, she is also an unpaid beauty consultant for friends and family. Besides make-up, her obsessions include the wizarding world of Harry Potter, podcasts, ice-cream, her walking pad and watching endless re-runs of The Office (US).
