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The interview doesn’t begin so much as it finds its footing.
Dr. Cyril Mitchel Agan and Jan Raymond Conadera are in Bangkok for one of the world’s biggest medical aesthetics congresses when they squeeze MEGA into their schedule. They first settle into a lounge inside the convention venue, hoping it’s quiet enough for a conversation. It isn’t. Between passing delegates and the steady hum of conversations around them, they pause, exchange a glance, and decide to look for another spot.
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It’s a brief interruption—one that would hardly register for most people. For Dr. Cyril and Jan, however, it’s simply another problem to solve.
Running one of the country’s leading aesthetic clinics has taught them that things rarely unfold exactly as planned. Adjust, recalibrate, move forward. It’s a mindset that has served them well whether they’re treating patients, speaking before international audiences, or, in this case, finding the right corner to tell their story.
By the time the interview properly begins, another dynamic emerges. They don’t merely answer questions together. They build answers together. One recalls a memory. The other fills in the details. One starts a sentence. The other instinctively finishes it. There are moments when they interrupt each other, but never to compete for the floor. Instead, each interruption feels like another thread completing the same thought. Perhaps that’s the closest thing they have to a secret.
After more than a decade together, Dr. Cyril and Jan have become fluent in each other’s rhythms. The partnership that powers Lift Aesthetic Clinic isn’t confined to the consultation room or the boardroom. It extends into nearly every aspect of their lives.
“We’ve always said we’re married through our work,” Dr. Cyril says. “We’re connected because we have the same passion. We’re working on the same thing. We see each other every day—at home and at work. We’re basically inseparable because of that.”
It’s an arrangement that might sound overwhelming to couples who fiercely protect the line between personal and professional life. For them, however, that line never needed drawing.
“It complements each other,” Dr. Cyril continues. “Even when we go home, it’s still about work at times, but it doesn’t feel like work because it seamlessly blends with our personal life.”
Jan sees it less as an overlap and more as a division of strengths. “Our relationship is actually very complementary because we have different roles in the business,” he says. “Even when we go home, we have different roles. He cooks. I love cleaning. We naturally divide things.”
That instinctive balance carries into the clinic. While Dr. Cyril leads its medical direction and has become one of the region’s most recognized voices in aesthetic medicine, Jan shapes how Lift communicates with the world—through branding, public relations, marketing, and the careful cultivation of a reputation that has grown largely through trust and word of mouth.
“If one person tries to do everything, eventually you’re going to drop a ball,” Dr. Cyril says. “You can’t juggle too many at the same time.”
Jan picks up the thought almost immediately. “He does the medical side. I do the marketing and PR. Sometimes he comes up with the idea and I execute it. Sometimes it’s the other way around. That’s how we complement each other.”
The ease with which they describe their arrangement makes it sound almost effortless. It isn’t. It is the product of years spent understanding where one ends and the other begins—and, more importantly, where those lines are better left blurred.
That partnership has shaped more than a successful business. It has built a culture. One where collaboration is instinctive, trust is assumed, and every decision begins with a simple question: How do we make this better?
For their patients, the answer often begins in the mirror. For Dr. Cyril and Jan, it begins with each other.
Working Beyond the Binary
There is no shortage of aesthetic clinics promising transformation. Lift Aesthetic Clinic promises something more nuanced: understanding.
Over the years, Dr. Cyril and Jan have built a clientele that cuts across industries and identities. Fashion personalities, entrepreneurs, beauty queens, executives, and entertainers all find their way to the clinic. So do some of the country’s most recognizable LGBTQIA+ personalities, including Marina Summers, Eva Le Queen, Paolo Ballesteros, Bonita Peñaranda, and Xtina—artists whose faces are as much instruments of their craft as they are expressions of identity. Their presence at Lift is hardly incidental.
DR. CYRIL TAKES HIS DISCUSSION ON AESTHETIC MEDICINE FOR THE TRANSGENDER COMMUNITY TO STAGES AROUND THE WORLD, INCLUDING TAIWAN, SINGAPORE, BANGKOK AND GENEVA
For Dr. Cyril and Jan, inclusivity has never been a campaign or a marketing strategy. It has always been embedded in the way they practice.
“Our clients know that we’re gay,” Jan says. “Even our female clients who come with their husbands become very comfortable with us. They want to know our story. But what they appreciate most is that we respect everyone equally.”
He pauses before listing the people who have become part of Lift’s growing community. “Whether you’re straight, whether you’re single, whether you’re not out, whether you’re out, whether you’re a drag queen like Marina Summers—everyone is welcome in our clinic.”
Respect, they believe, should never depend on identity. Neither should beauty. For Dr. Cyril, that philosophy has gradually reshaped the way he thinks about aesthetic medicine itself.
Long before conversations around gender fluidity became more commonplace, he found himself questioning many of the industry’s long-held assumptions. Much of aesthetic medicine, he explains, has traditionally been taught through rigid binaries: stronger jawlines for men, softer contours for women. The formulas were technically sound, but they didn’t always reflect the people sitting across from him. That realization crystallized while preparing an international lecture centered on a drag performer.
Without makeup, many drag artists still want to present masculine features in everyday life. Once they step into drag, however, those same faces become canvases for a completely different expression. Traditional aesthetics could explain one transformation. It struggled to explain both.
“If there’s a concept called gender fluidity,” Dr. Cyril says, “then in aesthetics, doctors should also be fluid.”
The idea would eventually become one of his most recognized lectures, presented before audiences across multiple countries. More importantly, it challenged fellow practitioners to move beyond templates and ask a more meaningful question: Who does the patient want to become?
For Dr. Cyril, the answer has never been about making every face conform to a single standard of beauty. It’s about helping patients arrive at a version of themselves that feels authentic. That perspective has resonated far beyond the consultation room.
As an international speaker, Dr. Cyril often shares his experiences treating LGBTQIA+ patients before audiences of hundreds of physicians. During one conference in Georgia, he openly introduced himself as a gay doctor—a moment he regarded as matter-of-fact but one that left a lasting impression on many in attendance.
“After my lecture, doctors came up to me and said, ‘You’re so brave to tell everyone you’re gay,'” he recalls. “For me, I was just telling my story. I was just telling them how I do things.”
The reaction surprised him. Not because he expected criticism, but because it reminded him that visibility still carries weight in rooms where it has historically been scarce.
At Lift, however, visibility isn’t performative. It is deeply personal. Sometimes it looks like restoring confidence after years of insecurity. Sometimes it looks like helping a transgender patient see an outward reflection that finally aligns with an inner truth. Sometimes it is simply creating a space where no explanation is required before care begins.
Beauty, after all, isn’t always about changing how someone looks. Sometimes it’s about affirming who they have always been.
The Path to Pride
Long before they became visible to thousands of patients and colleagues around the world, both Dr. Cyril and Jan spent years trying not to be seen. Like many LGBTQIA+ Filipinos growing up, they understood early that acceptance often came with conditions. Success first. Respect first. Then, perhaps, authenticity.
Dr. Cyril remembers arriving at that realization while he was still in medical school. “I came out very late,” he says. “My goal was to make sure I really did well in life—in my career, in my business, in my profession as a doctor—so that once I came out and expressed who I was, nobody could question me.”
He isn’t speaking about achievement for achievement’s sake. He is speaking about credibility. “The greatest fear of the LGBT community is that we won’t be respected,” he continues. “It’s hard to express yourself because your mind is trying to hide who you are.”
Jan’s journey followed a similar path. “When I was in high school until college, I told myself I wanted to be the best version of who I could be,” he says. “I wanted to be someone respectable, someone accomplished.” Everything else followed from there.
“The way I dress, how neat I am, even how I brand myself on social media—those things have always been intentional. I didn’t want people to admire me because I’m gay. I wanted them to admire me because of what I can do.”
It’s a distinction that continues to shape both their personal and professional lives. Neither man presents visibility as an obligation. Instead, they speak about it as something that became possible only after they had built lives sturdy enough to support it. That confidence didn’t arrive overnight. It emerged gradually.
“We reached a point where we just wanted to live our lives the way we wanted to,” Dr. Cyril says. “We didn’t really care anymore if people judged us. What’s important for us is our happiness.” That meant posting photos together, sharing their travels, dancing on social media, and appearing publicly not simply as business partners but as a couple.
“We’ve already earned respect from our peers,” he says. “So even as we expressed ourselves openly, nobody looked down on us.”
Their visibility, then, wasn’t an act of rebellion. It was the natural consequence of no longer feeling the need to edit themselves. That same philosophy informs the advice they now give other couples trying to build something together.
When asked they separate work from their relationship. The answer is simple: they don’t. “We’ve never really told each other, ‘Let’s stop talking about work,'” Dr. Cyril says with a laugh. “Our work is our life.”
For some couples, that would be unsustainable. For them, it is precisely what works. Jan describes their relationship as “very complementary.” They don’t compete for the same space. Instead, each fills the gaps the other leaves behind.
“I think having a second eye or ear is very valuable,” he says. “When we have to make big decisions, we support each other’s choices.” Their arrangement is unusual, perhaps even enviable. Yet what makes it remarkable isn’t that they spend nearly every waking hour together. It’s that after all these years, they still speak about one another with the admiration of people who know exactly what the other brings to the table.
The partnership may have begun with love but it has endured because of trust. And, as it turns out, trust has a way of changing what once felt impossible. Sometimes, it even changes what the future looks like.
Of Proposals and Counterproposals
When Dr. Cyril talks about the moment he knew he wanted to marry Jan, he doesn’t begin with a proposal. He begins with a hospital in Bangkok.
Jan came down with food poisoning during a holiday trip. Dr. Cyril accompanied him to the hospital, where he instinctively introduced himself as Jan’s husband so that the doctors mobilized and he could help expedite the situation. The experience of calling himself “husband”—and in a country that acknowledged gay marriage lingered. A decade in, Dr. Cyril then realized there was one thing their relationship still lacked: legal recognition.
“We’d already been together for ten years,” he recalls. “We’re practically married to our work. I realized that if something serious happened while we were traveling, at least one of us would be the legal next of kin.”
It wasn’t a fleeting thought. Over the next few weeks, he quietly began thinking about how he would propose.
The couple arrived in Paris for one of the world’s largest aesthetic medicine congresses, where Jan was slated to deliver a presentation. Unknown to him, Dr. Cyril had been coordinating with the congress organizers, the session moderator, and close friends to stage a surprise.
After Jan’s presentation, Dr. Cyril took the microphone during the question-and-answer portion. At first, it sounded like a message of congratulations. He spoke about the clinic they had built together, reflecting on how one had devoted himself to advancing aesthetic medicine while the other had shaped the business around it.
“The blend of our talents is making it successful,” Dr. Cyril told the audience. “Another thing that’s making it successful is our love for our work and our love for each other.”
Then he walked toward Jan, got down on one knee, and asked that he marry him.
“I thought he was just talking about my presentation,” Jan says, laughing. “I had no idea.”
The auditorium erupted in applause. Friends who had strategically positioned themselves around the room documented the proposal from every angle, while fellow delegates—many of them meeting the couple for the first time—lined up afterward to congratulate them. What had begun as another session at a medical congress became one of the conference’s most memorable moments.
Jan’s own proposal, however, never disappeared. Months later, during Dr. Cyril’s birthday celebration in Manila, he carried out the plan that had first taken shape after that hospital visit in Bangkok. This time, it was Jan’s turn to pop the question and present Dr. Cyril with a ring—a gesture the couple laughingly refers to as the “counterproposal.”
For a relationship built on partnership, it felt entirely fitting that they would each have the chance to ask the question.
Today, when they speak about the future, they spend surprisingly little time talking about wedding plans. Instead, they return to the values that have shaped both their relationship and their work.
“I have this full trust in God,” Dr. Cyril says. “As long as we do good, we’re good to people, we do our best always, we work hard, and we let life take us where we’re supposed to be.”
Jan shares the same outlook. “Don’t fear discrimination or what people think about you. Be ambitious. Be grateful for the people who truly accept you. Be kind. Kindness brings more blessings.”
Spend enough time listening to Dr. Cyril and Jan, and it becomes clear that Lift Aesthetic Clinic was never simply built around aesthetics. It was built around trust—trust in each other’s strengths, trust in a shared vision, and trust that authenticity would eventually matter more than approval.
That may be the truest measure of a power couple. Not that they built a successful clinic or found lasting love, but that they chose each other in every sense of the word—first through the life they built together, then through the questions they each found their own way of asking.
