Apyx Medical Brand Guidelines: Bovie Medical, Helium Plasma & a New Name in 2019

A company named after an inventor.

Apyx Medical spent most of its life under another name. English Wikipedia says the company was founded in Purchase, New York, in 1978 as Bovie Medical, and that it took that name from William T. Bovie, the American scientist credited with inventing the electrosurgical generator. Wikipedia’s article on Bovie himself says the surgeon Harvey Cushing began using his device in neurosurgical operations in 1926, and that Bovie received the John Scott Medal in 1928 for developing it.

The company went public early. Wikipedia says Bovie Medical listed its shares in 1983, trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol BVX. By the 2000s it was a Florida company: the FDA’s premarket notification database lists Bovie Medical at St. Petersburg on clearances from 2006 to 2008, and at Clearwater, on Florida’s Gulf coast, from 2009 onward. Wikipedia adds that Bovie Medical had a manufacturing facility in Bulgaria.

Its product line in those years was classic electrosurgery. FDA records show the Bovie Icon GI electrosurgical generator cleared in 2006, the IDS-400 generator in 2008, Resistick II coated electrodes in 2009, and the Bantam/PRO and DERM 941 and 942 generators in 2016, alongside laparoscopic electrodes, a saline-enhanced resection device and low-temperature cautery pens. These were the products that carried the Bovie name into hospitals and surgeons’ offices.

Helium plasma, then a split.

The turn came with a different kind of energy. In January 2012 the FDA cleared the Bovie J-Plasma Handpiece with a retractable cutting blade, and further J-Plasma handpieces followed in 2015 and 2017, including the Precise, Precise 360, Precise Open and Precise FLEX. J-Plasma combines helium gas with radiofrequency energy; Apyx’s website today describes its technology as “helium plasma + RF.” In March 2019 the FDA database records a clearance under the combined name Renuvion/J-Plasma, the first appearance there of the Renuvion name, and in October 2019 an Apyx Helium Plasma Generator.

The company then divided itself in two. English Wikipedia says Bovie Medical sold its electrosurgical division and the Bovie brand to Symmetry Surgical in 2018; another line of the same article gives August 2019 for the sale of the electrocautery business. Either way, the founder’s name went with the products that had made it familiar, and the remaining business needed a new one. Wikipedia says that on 1 January 2019 the company rebranded as Apyx Medical and moved its listing to Nasdaq under the symbol APYX.

The paperwork shows the transition. FDA clearances in July 2019 list the applicant as “Apyx Medical Corporation (Formerly Bovie Medical Corporation),” and two in October 2019 as “Bovie Medical Corporation Dba Apyx Medical Corporation.” From 2022 the database uses Apyx Medical Corporation alone, still at Clearwater.

The new name pointed the company toward cosmetic and plastic surgery. Its website now presents two brands: Renuvion, which it describes as helium plasma and radiofrequency technology for loose skin, and AYON, a body-contouring system. Apyx calls itself “a global leader in advanced energy technology”; that is the company’s own description. The J-Plasma name continues too: the FDA cleared a J-Plasma Precise FLEX handpiece under the Apyx name in January 2021.

Design and documentation.

Hospital device makers sell to clinicians, purchasing teams and hospital engineers rather than to shoppers, and their brands are built for that audience. Their catalogues and websites tend to show the equipment where it is used: infusion pumps on poles beside a bed, dialysis machines lined up in a treatment room, monitors and consoles in intensive care.

Much of the product is small and disposable, so the pictures often come close. Gloved hands hold a catheter, a cannula or an infusion set; blood tubing is coiled for a dialysis session; a dialyzer or a single-use endoscope is photographed on plain white so that every connector and label can be read. Product names usually lean on model numbers and technical terms rather than on lifestyle words.

People appear too, usually in uniform: nurses and doctors at the bedside, technicians at a workbench, trainers at a company teaching centre. Several makers in this group run their own training facilities for clinicians, and they present them as part of what they sell alongside the devices.

The trade meets at congresses and fairs. Medica in Düsseldorf gathers hospital suppliers from around the world each autumn; ASN Kidney Week, the American Society of Nephrology’s annual meeting, draws dialysis makers; and Digestive Disease Week brings together gastroenterologists and endoscopy suppliers. Stands, booth graphics and congress brochures are where many of these brands are seen at their largest, and this guide sets out what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it, and where it says its products are made.

Renuvion and AYON.

The move into aesthetics brought regulatory scrutiny. In March 2022 the FDA issued a safety communication warning against the use of the Renuvion/J-Plasma system for dermal resurfacing or skin contraction, uses for which it was not then cleared; at the time it was cleared for cutting, coagulation and ablation of soft tissue in open and laparoscopic surgery. The agency later reported new clearances: a Renuvion Dermal Handpiece on 25 May 2022, for certain wrinkle treatments in a limited range of skin types; the Renuvion APR Handpiece on 15 July 2022, for loose skin of the neck and under the chin; and the APR handpiece again on 27 April 2023, for use after liposuction in body contouring, according to the FDA’s update of 10 May 2023.

The product range has kept growing since. The FDA cleared the Apyx One Console in October 2022 and a Renuvion Micro Handpiece in June 2023. In May 2025 it cleared the AYON Body Contouring System, with a further AYON clearance in May 2026 and AYON power liposuction cannulas in August 2026. Apyx’s website describes AYON as an all-in-one platform combining electrosurgery, aspiration and Renuvion technology.

As an identity, Apyx is a study in starting again. The old name, taken from the inventor of the electrosurgical generator, now belonged to a business the company no longer owned. The replacement is short, coined and free of any person, and the company now leads with its product brands rather than its corporate one: its website opens on Renuvion and AYON, splits its pages between physicians and patients, and gives each brand its own sections, events and contact routes. Its headquarters remain in Clearwater, the city where Bovie Medical was based.

For a design guide, Apyx Medical shows how a company can give up a famous founder’s name and rebuild around a technology and two product brands. Compare Boston Scientific, another American device company, and Teleflex, another American maker of hospital devices. For this guide we use a deep violet and a soft lilac with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Apyx Medical’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.