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Top 3 Plastic Surgeons

An independent publication on aesthetic and plastic surgery

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The Lead · Industry

The Accutane Wait: A Six-Month Rule Built on a Handful of Case Reports

Almost every patient who finishes a course of isotretinoin is told the same thing: no lasers, no peels, no cosmetic procedures for six months. The rule is nearly forty years old, it comes from a small number of case reports involving techniques most clinics no longer use, and in 2017 a multidisciplinary consensus panel reviewed the evidence and found almost none of it holds up. Here is where the rule came from, what the consensus actually concluded, which two procedures still deserve the wait, and why so many practices keep enforcing the old version anyway.

August 3, 2026

By The Editorial Desk

8 min

How Many Have You Done? The Case Volume Question That Outranks the Diploma

Patients are trained to check board certification, and they should. What almost nobody asks is the question with the stronger evidence behind it: how many of this specific operation the surgeon performed in the last twelve months. Across surgery, higher operative volume tracks with better outcomes. Cosmetic surgery is the field where that data is thinnest and where the question is easiest to dodge. Here is what the volume literature actually supports, why the learning curve resets with every new technique, and how to ask without getting a number that means nothing.

August 3, 2026 · 7 min

Industry

The Pre-Op Question Patients Lie About: Cannabis and the Anesthesia Dose Nobody Can Guess

Anesthesiologists have spent a decade watching the same thing happen. A patient who checked no on the drug question needs far more propofol than the chart predicts, wakes up in more pain than the case warrants, and mentions on the way out that they use a gummy most nights. Cannabis is legal across much of the country, patients have stopped classifying it as a drug, and the intake form still asks the question in language designed for 1994. Here is what regular cannabis use actually does to sedation, airway reactivity, and postoperative pain, what the first consensus guidelines recommend, and why the disclosure is worth making even when nobody asks it well.

August 2, 2026 · 9 min

Patient Guidance

Nobody Is Symmetrical: The Asymmetry Your Surgeon Sees and You Do Not

Read a cosmetic surgery consent form closely and you will find asymmetry listed not as a complication but as an expected outcome. That is not a legal dodge. It is an accurate description of human anatomy, because measurable left-right difference is the baseline in essentially every face and every chest, and no operation resets it to zero. The problem is that almost nobody hears this before surgery. They hear it afterward, at the six-month mark, when the swelling has gone and the difference they never noticed in the mirror is suddenly the only thing they can see. Here is what asymmetry actually is, which kinds can be corrected and which cannot, and the question that separates a surgeon who planned for yours from one who is going to discover it with you.

August 2, 2026 · 10 min

The City Guides

Top surgeons, city by city.

Short, considered editorial picks for the cities where aesthetic medicine has the highest concentration of practitioners doing distinct work. We add a city when we have done the reporting, not before.

2 featured · California

Beverly Hills

An editorial guide to the city's aesthetic medicine scene.

3 featured · California

Los Angeles

An editorial guide to the city's plastic surgery scene beyond the Beverly Hills triangle.

3 featured · New York

New York

An editorial guide to the city's plastic surgery establishment.

Choosing a plastic surgeon is among the few decisions that cannot be appealed. It deserves real reporting, not advertising dressed as a recommendation.

Top 3 Plastic Surgeons is an independent publication covering aesthetic and plastic surgery: the procedures, the advances in technique, and the surgeons doing the most considered work in the field. We report on it. We do not sell placement within it.

We do not accept paid placement, and we do not rank by advertising spend or by the volume of five-star reviews a practice can solicit. Our reporting draws on board records, peer interviews, outcomes data, and direct patient testimony, revisited as the field changes.

§ 05 · The Letter

Each issue carries one new surgeon profile, one dispatch from the reporting desk, and an editor's note on whatever question we could not stop thinking about that week. No sponsors. No partner content. No reason to exist except the subject.

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Top 3 Plastic Surgeons

The Accutane Wait: A Six-Month Rule Built on a Handful of Case Reports

How Many Have You Done? The Case Volume Question That Outranks the Diploma

The Pre-Op Question Patients Lie About: Cannabis and the Anesthesia Dose Nobody Can Guess

Nobody Is Symmetrical: The Asymmetry Your Surgeon Sees and You Do Not