The State of Deep Plane Facelift 2026
An evidence-based audit of the global deep plane facelift practitioner landscape
Published August 19, 2026 · Full methodology
By the numbers
Geographic concentration
Top 20 countries by active practitioner count. United States and Turkey together account for roughly 52% 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 | 162 |
| 2 | New York | USA | 60 |
| 3 | Beverly Hills | USA | 52 |
| 4 | São Paulo | Brazil | 36 |
| 5 | Seoul | South Korea | 27 |
| 6 | Tehran | Iran | 26 |
| 7 | London | UK | 25 |
| 8 | Chicago | USA | 20 |
| 9 | Toronto | Canada | 20 |
| 10 | Houston | USA | 19 |
| 11 | Newport Beach | USA | 18 |
| 12 | Cairo | Egypt | 18 |
| 13 | Paris | France | 17 |
| 14 | Los Angeles | USA | 17 |
| 15 | San Diego | 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=413):
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 | 2,096 |
| Bryan Mendelson | Australia | 38 | 13 | 25 | 4,949 |
| James Zins | USA | 45 | 12 | 16 | 7,100 |
| Joe Niamtu | USA | 11 | 12 | 21 | 376 |
| Ben Talei | USA | 5 | 11 | 11 | 64 |
| Minhee Ryu | South Korea | 59 | 8 | 8 | 19,897 |
| Patrick Tonnard | Belgium | 26 | 8 | 10 | 3,420 |
| Fred Fedok | USA | 25 | 7 | 15 | 2,392 |
| Michele Pascali | Italy | 18 | 7 | 9 | 1,175 |
| Rajiv Grover | UK | 24 | 6 | 9 | 3,752 |
| Mark Glasgold | USA | 18 | 6 | 14 | 1,017 |
| Richard Zoumalan | USA | 17 | 6 | 8 | 1,031 |
| Kevin Sadati | USA | 4 | 6 | 6 | 61 |
| Chris Surek | USA | 3 | 6 | 9 | 138 |
| Robert Glasgold | USA | 17 | 5 | 13 | 941 |
| Nabil Fakih | Lebanon | 11 | 5 | 6 | 358 |
| Phillip Langsdon | USA | 10 | 5 | 15 | 307 |
| James Grotting | USA | 31 | 4 | 5 | 3,728 |
| Oren Friedman | USA | 31 | 4 | 10 | 3,188 |
| Allan Wulc | USA | 27 | 4 | 8 | 2,289 |
| Ruth Graf | Brazil | 23 | 4 | 4 | 1,806 |
| Andrew Trussler | USA | 22 | 4 | 6 | 1,412 |
| Renato Saltz | USA | 17 | 4 | 5 | 1,121 |
| Hatan Mortada | Saudi Arabia | 15 | 4 | 8 | 882 |
| Nabil Fanous | Canada | 14 | 4 | 4 | 550 |
Surgeon experience distribution
Years of surgical experience across 1,063 listed surgeons with experience data (75% of active surgeons). Average: 18.2 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 1,010 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 944 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)
- 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: 184 NPI-matched US surgeons, 40 ABFPRS diplomates, 413 academically-active practitioners (≥1 indexed publication).
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™.