The Paseo Delicias collective in the Rancho Santa Fe village added a new business toward the end of last year with the grand opening of the luxe medical spa Moonlight Longevity.
At Moonlight, owner and practitioner Kyle Frakes is focused on helping his patients maintain a youthful appearance that is both natural-looking and age-appropriate.
“It’s about looking good for your age, not necessarily looking 30 to 40 years younger,” said Frakes. “Everyone has their own natural beauty and I like to celebrate that.”
Kyle Frakes, owner of Moonlight Longevity. (Courtesy Moonlight Longevity)
He takes care to work with his clients to get to know them, understand their needs and develop a customized plan that both highlights their features and optimizes their health, a comprehensive approach to aesthetics and wellness to help people look good and feel good.
“Most people don’t want some radical aesthetic shift or some insane protocol out of the gate. We progressively take steps towards their long-term goal,” Frakes said.
Moonlight’s stacked service menu includes injectables such as hyaluronic acid fillers, biostimulants, Botox and Dysport; exosome therapy; hormone therapy; IV therapy, vitamin injections, and peptides for weight loss, injury recovery and building lean muscle. Frakes performs laser and skin rejuvenation services like microneedling and intense pulsed light (IPL) that can help with pigment correction, skin tightening and overall skin quality. He also uses diode lasers for hair removal procedures.
“When I tell people that we’ve opened this practice here, they say, ’It’s about time’. They always had to go somewhere else,” said Frakes, who is now a Rancho Santa Fe resident.
Frakes’ 6’10” height betrays a background in sports—the ex-pro athlete briefly played basketball overseas in Germany. He played college hoops for Cal State East Bay, where he graduated in 2018 with a degree in kinesiology.
He took a somewhat unusual pathway to his current field, with a lot of experiences packed into a short amount of time.
After his playing career ended, he started out in sales while also getting certified as an EMT and working nights, “Then COVID hit and everything turned upside down”.
As he was always interested in pursuing a career that was patient-facing, he briefly considered going to medical school but instead got into aesthetic medical sales. Working for a company that sold lasers and devices for medical spas and to plastic surgeons, he fell in love with the space and decided to commit to going to nursing school and becoming a practitioner, taking pre-requisite courses online. The Moonlight name is a nod to that time of his life—moonlighting by taking classes and shadowing clinicians while working a highly time-intensive sales job that he excelled at.
After two years of finishing his pre-requisites, he left his job in January 2024 to attend Azusa Pacific University on an accelerated track to become a registered nurse, finishing just six months ago.
One of three treatment rooms in Rancho Santa Fe’s Moonlight Longevity. (Courtesy Moonlight Longevity)
Before getting licensed and actually being able to treat patients, he wanted to gain as much exposure and background clinical knowledge as possible to master the didactic component of aesthetic and wellness procedures. He shadowed well-respected providers and underwent foundational injectables training through Allergan Aesthetics, the company that makes Botox: “I’ll never know too much, you can never stop learning,” he said of developing a mastery of injectable techniques.
He would put his knowledge of lasers up against anybody, thanks to his experience on the sales side, successfully moving the technologies.
“As far as the level of expertise I have and the treatment protocols we have in-house, it was very important to me that I didn’t have to delegate to anyone for a lack of skill,” Frakes said.
Frakes didn’t totally plan to open his own business so soon out of nursing school, but the pathway was so perfect that he had to do it, he had to be a little crazy to be willing to break the mold.
He settled into his spot in one of the 6024 Paseo Delicias suites in October, giving the space a beautiful makeover with one large treatment room and three private rooms, outfitted with stylish leather chairs and optimal lighting. There is new flooring in the lobby and touches of marble throughout—an outdoor patio features a greenery wall and lounge chairs with the potential for a future cold plunge tub.
He gives credit to real estate agent Delorine Jackson for being so entrepreneurial-focused and putting the right people in the units she owns.
“I feel very welcomed here,” said Frakes. “I just love meeting people in this area and everyone’s been incredibly nice and supportive.”
The new Moonlight Longevity medical spa in Rancho Santa Fe. (Karen Billing)
A member of the Rancho Santa Fe Rotary Club, he has benefitted from a lot of local partnerships: Rotary RCG Art Advisory helped select artwork for the walls, Plantology helped with the greenery, and Paseo restaurant and Fieldswell provided support with his grand opening. That grand opening was an unexpectedly well-attended affair in late November— 200 people showed up in the pouring rain to help celebrate Rancho Santa Fe’s newest tenant.
When treating patients, Frakes begins every consultation with the positives, asking people what they like best about their appearance. He said it’s inevitable that people will want to pick themselves apart but he takes time to understand his patients and educate them well on the treatments and procedures.
“When you walk through the front door, he’ll make you feel like you guys have known each other forever,” said Hailey Ferguson, practice manager. Her biggest task is keeping Frakes on schedule as he spends so much time with his patients, making sure they never leave with any questions. The education never stops, she said.
“It’s important to me that they’re not just another patient in the system. Every single person I view as an individual with goals and pain points and insecurities,” Frakes said. “We are fixing things that so many people see as vanity, but to me, it’s really more of a confidence thing. I think that when you’re operating from a high confidence in any part of life, you’re going to operate better. You’re going to get better outcomes if you feel good about yourself.”
Moonlight Longevity is open seven days a week at 6024 Paseo Delicias, suite B, Rancho Santa Fe. For more information, visit moonlightlongevity.com