Cynosure Brand Guidelines: A 1991 Massachusetts Laser Maker, Hologic & Lutronic

A physicist’s second laser company.

Cynosure is a Massachusetts maker of aesthetic laser and energy-based systems, sold to doctors, clinics and medical spas rather than to the public. It was founded in 1991 by the physicist Horace Furumoto, according to a July 2007 statement from the laser maker Candela reported by Laser Focus World.

It was not his first company. The same report says Furumoto earned a doctorate in physics at Ohio State University and worked at NASA and at Avco before co-founding Candela in 1970, a business set up to supply custom lasers to the scientific community. He was Candela’s president and chief executive until 1990, and then went on to found Cynosure in 1991, where he was again president and chief executive until he retired in 2003, Laser Focus World reported. Cynosure is therefore, in a direct sense, a second-generation company of the Massachusetts laser trade: a founder who had already built one laser business starting another.

The name is older than any laser. English Wikipedia traces “cynosure” to the Greek for “dog’s tail,” a name for Polaris in its role as the pole star, and gives its figurative senses as a guiding principle or a focus of attention. For a company that sells to practitioners, it is a name about direction and about being looked at, not about the technology inside the box.

The company is based in Westford, Massachusetts. The joint release that announced its combination with Lutronic in January 2024 was datelined Westford and Billerica, Massachusetts, and the company’s website gives a Westford address today.

Hologic, private equity and Lutronic.

Cynosure changed hands three times in seven years. In March 2017 the Massachusetts medical-technology group Hologic completed its acquisition of Cynosure, Inc., which Hologic’s release called “a leader in medical aesthetics systems and technologies.” Hologic bought it through a tender offer for its Class A shares that expired on 21 March 2017, after which Cynosure became a wholly owned subsidiary, according to the release as reprinted by HealthManagement.org on 22 March 2017.

The arrangement was short. On 20 November 2019 Hologic agreed to sell the business to an affiliate of investment funds managed by the private-equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, MedTech Dive reported; Hologic’s chief executive said that since the 2017 purchase Cynosure had “significantly underperformed our expectations,” and about 825 employees were to move with the business. The sale was completed on 30 December 2019, according to the report’s update of that date; the report said the sale let Hologic concentrate on its core businesses.

The third change came from Korea. On 19 January 2024 Cynosure and Hahn & Company, a Korean private-equity firm that had recently acquired the aesthetic-device maker Lutronic, announced a definitive agreement to combine Cynosure and Lutronic, expected to close in the first quarter of that year, according to their joint release on PR Newswire. The release described both as global providers of energy-based medical aesthetic treatment systems; it named Nadav Tomer as Cynosure’s chief executive and Haelyung Hwang as Lutronic’s founder and chief executive, and said Lutronic had more than two decades of work in laser and energy-based systems.

The company’s website now says that “Cynosure and Lutronic merged in 2024.” The combined business trades as Cynosure Lutronic, and its leadership page names Tomer, formerly global president of Johnson & Johnson’s DePuy Synthes spine business, as chief executive.

Design and documentation.

Makers of aesthetic lasers and energy-based devices sell to clinicians first and to their patients second, and their brand material is built for both. The usual product image is a tall white console on castors, with a touchscreen and one or more handpieces on coiled cables, photographed in a softly lit treatment room. The machines are designed to look at home in a clinic and in a medical spa alike.

Around the hardware sits a familiar visual language: close-ups of glowing skin, clinicians in white coats, pale backgrounds, generous white space and clean, light sans-serif type. Product names tend to be short coined words, often styled with trademark symbols, and families are extended with suffixes such as Pro, Plus or a version number. Colour is usually held back to one accent against white, grey and skin tones.

Much of the industry’s calendar runs through medical congresses rather than consumer shows. AMWC, the Aesthetic & Anti-Aging Medicine World Congress; IMCAS in Paris; and the annual meeting of the American Society for Laser Medicine and Surgery (ASLMS) are among the places where new systems are shown to doctors. Candela, for example, says it unveiled its Vbeam Pro at the 2025 ASLMS meeting and launched its Glacē system in Europe at IMCAS in January 2026.

The companies behind these brands have changed hands often, through mergers, private-equity buyouts and restructurings, and several now trade under names different from the ones they started with. This guide sets out who founded each maker, who owns it now and what it says about its own products, and gives the company’s claims as its own.

Two names, one address.

Through every owner, the name stayed. Under Hologic the business kept trading as Cynosure; after the 2024 combination the company paired the two names rather than dropping one, and the web address cynosurelutronic.com forwards to cynosure.com, so the older name kept the front door.

Its range is presented by product name. The website’s product menu leads with XERF, PicoSure Pro, Genius and Mosaic 3D, and the enquiry form on the same site lists many more, among them SculpSure, Smartlipo, TempSure and MonaLisa Touch. The January 2024 release described Cynosure’s portfolio as spanning skin revitalisation, body contouring and hair removal, and said the company sold through its own sales force in the United States, Canada, France, Morocco, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, Australia, China, Japan and Korea, and through distributors in about 130 other countries. The release described the combined company as having a commercial presence in more than 130 countries.

The company describes itself in the language of scale. Its about page says the merger brought together “a combined 60 years of product innovation” and that it aims to “create new standards for energy-based devices around the world”; we give those as the company’s own words. The 2024 release said Cynosure had “an over 30-year history,” which matches the 1991 founding date reported in 2007.

The ownership story is also a story about a category. Hologic’s 2017 release presented aesthetics as a large and growing market to enter; its 2019 sale, as MedTech Dive reported it, let Hologic concentrate on its core businesses; and the 2024 combination was framed by both companies as building a larger global player in energy-based aesthetic devices. The brand passed through a diversified medical group, a private-equity owner and a Korean-backed merger, and kept its name each time.

For a design guide, Cynosure shows how a name chosen for a star can outlast three changes of owner and a merger, and how a merged company can carry two names side by side. Compare Candela, the laser company Furumoto co-founded in 1970, and Cutera, another maker of aesthetic laser and energy-based systems. For this guide we use a polar navy and a copper with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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