REPORT · 2026 · DEEPPLANE.COM
The State of Deep Plane Facelift 2026
An evidence-based audit of the global deep plane facelift practitioner landscape
Published May 12, 2026 · Full methodology
By the numbers
Geographic concentration
Top 20 countries by active practitioner count. United States and Turkey together account for roughly 56% 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 | Istanbul | Turkey | 152 |
| 2 | New York | USA | 43 |
| 3 | Beverly Hills | USA | 39 |
| 4 | Sao Paulo | Brazil | 26 |
| 5 | London | UK | 17 |
| 6 | Seoul | South Korea | 16 |
| 7 | Newport Beach | USA | 13 |
| 8 | Paris | France | 12 |
| 9 | Los Angeles | USA | 12 |
| 10 | Houston | USA | 12 |
| 11 | Atlanta | USA | 11 |
| 12 | Cairo | Egypt | 11 |
| 13 | Moscow | Russia | 11 |
| 14 | Bogota | Colombia | 10 |
| 15 | San Diego | USA | 10 |
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=410):
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 | 2,095 |
| Bryan Mendelson | Australia | 38 | 13 | 25 | 4,936 |
| James Zins | USA | 45 | 12 | 16 | 7,095 |
| Joe Niamtu | USA | 11 | 12 | 21 | 375 |
| Ben Talei | USA | 5 | 10 | 10 | 64 |
| Minhee Ryu | South Korea | 59 | 8 | 8 | 19,826 |
| Patrick Tonnard | Belgium | 26 | 8 | 10 | 3,419 |
| Fred Fedok | USA | 25 | 7 | 15 | 2,391 |
| Michele Pascali | Italy | 18 | 7 | 9 | 1,174 |
| Rajiv Grover | UK | 24 | 6 | 9 | 3,750 |
| Mark Glasgold | USA | 18 | 6 | 14 | 1,017 |
| Richard Zoumalan | USA | 17 | 6 | 8 | 1,031 |
| Kevin Sadati | USA | 4 | 6 | 6 | 60 |
| Chris Surek | USA | 3 | 6 | 9 | 138 |
| Robert Glasgold | USA | 17 | 5 | 13 | 941 |
| Nabil Fakih | Lebanon | 11 | 5 | 6 | 351 |
| Phillip Langsdon | USA | 10 | 5 | 15 | 297 |
| Jon Perenack | USA | 8 | 5 | 14 | 162 |
| Oren Friedman | USA | 31 | 4 | 10 | 3,184 |
| James Grotting | USA | 31 | 4 | 5 | 3,644 |
| Allan Wulc | USA | 27 | 4 | 8 | 2,287 |
| Ruth Graf | Brazil | 23 | 4 | 4 | 1,804 |
| Andrew Trussler | USA | 22 | 4 | 6 | 1,411 |
| Renato Saltz | USA | 17 | 4 | 5 | 1,120 |
| Hatan Mortada | Saudi Arabia | 15 | 4 | 8 | 875 |
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)
- 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: 164 NPI-matched US surgeons, 40 ABFPRS diplomates, 410 academically-active practitioners (≥1 indexed publication).
Cite this report
If you reference this report in academic or editorial work, please use:
DeepPlane.com. (2026). The State of Deep Plane Facelift 2026: A Global Practitioner Audit. DeepPlane.com. Retrieved from https://deepplane.com/state-of-deep-plane-2026