A Cut Above
The biggest names in facelifts and blephs convene for a weekend of discourse and dissection.
Last weekend, some of the greatest minds in facial plastic surgery convened in Fort Lauderdale for a two-day affair hosted by Bringing You the Masters. Chaired by Drs. Ben Talei, Guy Massry, and Steven Pearlman, the meeting combined a series of lectures with hands-on cadaver dissections (which may sound creepy, but are actually the ultimate way for surgeons to demo and sharpen their skills). The focus: aging face surgery—the nuances of deep-plane facelifts and periorbital rejuvenation, specifically. (Here’s the full agenda.) Among the presenters were boldface names like Drs. Flora Levin, Elizabeth Chance, Mike Nayak, Marc Mani, and Dominic Bray. Attendees included esteemed aesthetic surgeons aiming to up their respective games.
If you follow these doctors, you probably saw snippets of the event. I was flying back from Florida (school break) as the meeting was getting underway and had a strange sense of FOMO watching it unfold, this sort of Coachella of plastic surgery, with its star-studded lineup. Perhaps next year I’ll try to sneak onto the guest list. In the meantime, enjoy these highlights from those who were there in the flesh.
“When I teach, I always learn. It forces me to think about the concepts that I’m teaching and sometimes see them from a different angle as I’m explaining them. For example, when someone asks how I find a certain structure, but I normally just find it and never think about how, it forces me to analyze the steps I take and, in doing so, I may find redundancies or inefficiencies that I didn’t notice before.
The same goes for listening to my colleagues talk about the procedures they do. While they’re the same surgeries [that I perform], the way they approach a concept is often different. We all live in our own ‘bubble’ and can get complacent in what we do routinely. This course allows us to open those boundaries. You can never have too much anatomy learning. Even as a seasoned surgeon, it’s helpful to review detailed anatomy.” —Flora Levin, MD, board-certified oculoplastic surgeon in Westport, Connecticut
