Est. MMXXVIIndependent

Top 3 Plastic Surgeons

An independent publication on aesthetic and plastic surgery

Beverly HillsLos AngelesNew YorkMiami
A woman in her mid-thirties in a white tank top, dark hair pulled back, seated in soft window light in a white clinic room and looking down at a small brown mole on her bare shoulder while a clinician's blue-gloved hand rests beside it

The Lead · Procedure Deep-Dive

Cosmetic Mole Removal: Shave Versus Excision, Why a Mole Can Grow Back Under a Flat Scar, and Why Every One of Them Belongs in a Pathology Jar Even When It Came Off for Looks

Removing a mole is the smallest operation in aesthetic medicine and the one most often done badly, because it looks too simple to plan. There are two honest ways to take a mole off: shave it flush with the skin and let the wound heal on its own, or cut it out whole and sew the line closed. Each leaves a different scar, each fails in a different way, and the choice between them is decided by the mole, the location, and the patient's skin far more than by preference. Underneath both sits a rule that the retail end of the market has started to skip: whatever comes off goes to a pathologist, because a mole removed for cosmetic reasons is still a pigmented lesion, and the only way to know what it was is to look. This piece covers what a mole actually is and which ones people want gone, what a shave does and why the pigment can return in a form that alarms pathologists, what an excision does and why the scar is three times longer than the mole, why lasers and pens and mail-order acids destroy the one thing that mattered, and where the scar will be worse than the spot it replaced.

September 8, 2026

·

By The Editorial Desk

·

21 min

Top Stories

See all articles →
A man in his early thirties with short dark hair and light stubble, in a charcoal sweater, seen in profile against a pale grey clinic wall in soft window light, while a masked clinician's blue-gloved hand rests on the bridge of his nose during a consultation

Procedure Deep-Dive

Male Rhinoplasty: What Makes a Nose Read as Masculine, Why Thick Skin and Heavy Bone Change the Operation, and Why the Nose That Is Two Millimetres Too Small Is the One Men Regret

Men make up a larger share of rhinoplasty than of almost any other cosmetic operation, and the noses they bring in are different: bigger, broken more often, covered in thicker skin, and sitting on faces with less tolerance for a result that has been reduced past the point where it still belongs to a man. The surgery uses the same incisions, the same osteotomies, and the same grafts as any rhinoplasty. What changes is the target. The profile stays straight rather than scooped, the tip is rotated less, the bridge is left higher, and the whole plan is built around leaving more than a surgeon would leave in a woman, because the failure that men come back to fix is almost never a nose that was left too large. This piece covers what actually makes a nose read as masculine and where the numbers differ, why bone, cartilage, and skin make the operation harder to refine and slower to settle, the feminization trap that a millimetre or two of over-reduction springs, what men actually ask for and which requests a good surgeon redirects, and what the year of recovery looks like on a schedule that cannot hide bruising under makeup.

September 8, 2026 · 20 min

A young woman in her mid-twenties in a beige knit sweater, hair in a low bun, seen in profile in soft window light with a smooth unlined forehead, standing before a round frameless mirror on a pale plaster wall in a quiet minimal room

Procedure Deep-Dive

Preventative Botox: What Baby Botox and Microtox Actually Are, the One Pair of Twins the Whole Prevention Claim Rests On, and What Twenty Years of Toxin Does to a Face That Started at Twenty-Five

Preventative Botox is the most successful reframing in the history of injectables. A drug approved to soften the lines a patient already has is now sold, in smaller doses and under gentler names, to patients who do not have them yet, on the theory that a muscle that cannot fold the skin cannot etch it. The theory is plausible. The evidence for it is one pair of identical twins followed by a single surgeon, a handful of open-label series in which treatment intervals lengthened over the years, and a great deal of expert opinion. Meanwhile the thing that actually causes most visible facial aging, ultraviolet light, has decades of data behind it and costs a few dollars a month. This piece covers what preventative, baby, and micro toxin actually mean, what the prevention evidence does and does not show, what repeated toxin does to a young face over decades, the arithmetic of a habit that starts at twenty-five, and when a low dose in a young patient is a reasonable decision rather than a subscription.

September 8, 2026 · 19 min

A lean athletic man in his early thirties standing barefoot in profile, looking out through tall white-paned sash windows in a whitewashed studio with worn wooden floorboards, wearing plain navy athletic shorts, torso relaxed with natural abdominal definition, a paint-flecked wooden stool with a mug and houseplants behind him, soft overcast daylight on realistic skin texture

Procedure Deep-Dive

Abdominal Etching: The Six-Pack a Cannula Can Draw, the Body Fat It Only Reads Under, and What the Lines Do When the Weight Comes Back

Abdominal etching is liposuction used as a pencil rather than a shovel. The surgeon thins the fat over the grooves of the abdominal wall, the midline, the borders of the rectus muscle, and the horizontal bands that cross it, and leaves fat over the muscle bellies, so that the six-pack a patient has spent years failing to uncover appears in an afternoon. It is real, it has thirty years of literature behind it, and it works on a narrow band of people: lean, with tight skin, with muscle underneath worth revealing. On everyone else it produces lines drawn onto a body that does not have the anatomy to justify them, and because the fat cells that were removed do not come back, those lines are permanent in a way the patient's weight is not. This piece covers the technique, who it reads on, what the grooves do when the weight changes, the complications the superficial plane brings with it, and what the fat grafting, implant, and device alternatives actually deliver.

September 7, 2026 · 19 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.

More from the Journal

The complete archive →

§ 01 · Editorial Standards

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

One letter, every Sunday.

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.

Weekly · No cost · Leave at any time