The State of Deep Plane Facelift 2026
An evidence-based audit of the global deep plane facelift practitioner landscape
Published May 12, 2026 · Data read October 12, 2026 · Full methodology
By the numbers
Geographic concentration
Top 20 countries by active practitioner count. United States and Turkey together account for roughly 53% of the global deep plane facelift workforce, reflecting both domestic patient demand (US) and a mature medical-tourism corridor (Turkey).
Top practitioner cities
City-level concentration matters more than country totals for patients planning destination travel — these cities offer the deepest selection.
| Rank | City | Country | Surgeons |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | New York | USA | 58 |
| 2 | Beverly Hills | USA | 54 |
| 3 | São Paulo | Brazil | 35 |
| 4 | Seoul | South Korea | 27 |
| 5 | London | UK | 26 |
| 6 | Tehran | Iran | 25 |
| 7 | Houston | USA | 20 |
| 8 | Chicago | USA | 20 |
| 9 | Toronto | Canada | 19 |
| 10 | Atlanta | USA | 17 |
| 11 | Paris | France | 17 |
| 12 | Cairo | Egypt | 17 |
| 13 | Los Angeles | USA | 17 |
| 14 | Newport Beach | USA | 16 |
| 15 | Dallas | USA | 16 |
Academic output distribution
Hirsch index ("h-index") measures both productivity and citation impact. An h-index of N means the researcher has at least N papers each cited ≥N times. Among DEEPPLANE™'s academically-active cohort (n=131):
Highest-cited practitioners
Filtered to surgeons with ≥1 facelift-specific peer-reviewed publication (CrossRef-indexed). Ranked by facelift publication count, then h-index. Name-collision false positives (e.g. unrelated researchers sharing a name) are excluded by the relevance gate.
| Surgeon | Country | h-index | Facelift papers | All papers | Total citations |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Andrew Jacono | USA | 26 | 23 | 23 | 2,166 |
| James Zins | USA | 46 | 12 | 16 | 7,332 |
| Joe Niamtu | USA | 11 | 12 | 21 | 377 |
| Ben Talei | USA | 5 | 11 | 11 | 72 |
| Minhee Ryu | South Korea | 59 | 8 | 8 | 19,409 |
| Fred Fedok | USA | 25 | 7 | 15 | 2,432 |
| Mark Glasgold | USA | 18 | 6 | 14 | 1,017 |
| Richard Zoumalan | USA | 17 | 6 | 7 | 1,047 |
| Kevin Sadati | USA | 4 | 6 | 6 | 61 |
| Chris Surek | USA | 3 | 6 | 9 | 142 |
| Robert Glasgold | USA | 17 | 5 | 13 | 955 |
| Hatan Mortada | Saudi Arabia | 15 | 5 | 9 | 882 |
| James Grotting | USA | 31 | 4 | 5 | 3,728 |
| Oren Friedman | USA | 31 | 4 | 10 | 3,260 |
| Allan Wulc | USA | 27 | 4 | 8 | 2,289 |
| Ruth Graf | Brazil | 24 | 4 | 4 | 1,840 |
| Andrew Trussler | USA | 22 | 4 | 6 | 1,412 |
| Renato Saltz | USA | 17 | 4 | 5 | 1,135 |
| Nabil Fanous | Canada | 14 | 4 | 4 | 550 |
| Alessandro Gualdi | Italy | 12 | 4 | 5 | 410 |
| Samir Ghoraba | Egypt | 5 | 4 | 4 | 76 |
| Norman Waterhouse | UK | 22 | 3 | 5 | 1,878 |
| Michael Sundine | USA | 17 | 3 | 5 | 868 |
| Paul Nassif | USA | 14 | 3 | 8 | 520 |
| Saba Motakef | USA | 12 | 3 | 5 | 894 |
Surgeon experience distribution
Years of surgical experience across 657 listed surgeons with experience data (51% of active surgeons). Average: 21.9 years.
Source: surgeon-reported and admin-verified years of experience. Bucket '<5' includes residents and early-career specialists.
Social media presence
Combined Instagram following across 875 listed surgeons with a measured audience — a proxy for community reach and patient-facing authority.
Combined follower count double-counts overlapping audiences. It measures practitioner-community reach, not unique patient eyeballs. Source: Apify-licensed harvest + authorized IG Basic Display API.
Patient review aggregate
Google patient reviews across 876 listed surgeons. Excludes listings flagged as clinic or hospital aggregates (rather than individual surgeon ratings).
Source: Google Places enrichment, refreshed monthly. Only surgeons with at least one review are counted. Average rating is the mean of per-surgeon Google ratings, not a weighted aggregate.
Trust verification ladder
Every fact on a DEEPPLANE™ surgeon profile carries provenance. Multi-source agreement promotes facts up the verification ladder — patients see the verification tier explicitly on each profile.
Methodology
The DEEPPLANE™ practitioner registry is assembled from 9 independent data sources organized into three tiers. Every fact stored in the registry carries the source's canonical URL, a captured-at timestamp, and a SHA-256 hash of the source payload — enabling drift detection across quarterly refreshes.
- NPI (HHS NPPES)
- ABFPRS (American Board of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery)
- OIG HHS LEIE (exclusions; NPI-matched surgeons only — see coverage)
- OpenAlex (academic graph)
- ORCID (researcher identity)
- CrossRef (DOI registry)
- Wikidata
- Google Places
- Instagram (Apify-licensed harvest)
Reconciliation: Multi-tier-1 cross-corroboration. Facts emitted by ≥2 independent tier-1 sources earn gold-tier verification. Sources with hash-fingerprinting enable drift detection across quarterly refreshes.
Coverage: 190 NPI-matched US surgeons, 95 ABFPRS diplomates, 131 academically-active practitioners (≥1 indexed publication). The OIG LEIE check is scoped to the NPI-matched subset: an exclusion is detectable only where the surgeon has an NPI on file and the federal row carries one, so it is not a directory-wide screen.
Cite this report
If you reference this report in academic or editorial work, please use:
DEEPPLANE™. (2026). The State of Deep Plane Facelift 2026: A Global Practitioner Audit. DEEPPLANE™. Retrieved from https://deepplane.com/state-of-deep-plane-2026
Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — free to share and adapt with attribution to DEEPPLANE™.