Forget everything you thought you knew about aesthetic enhancement—appearance-improving options are being invented at a laser-quick pace. Troubled by wrinkles? A doctor can inject them with novel fillers derived from sugar or bone matrix, or eviscerate them with light. Want a little fat removed from your jawline? You can get it frozen or melted. Even the classic face-lift has evolved from a basic nip and tuck to a more customized blend of boosting, volumizing and refining. All this innovation has been driven by consumer demand: In 2011, more than nine million surgical and nonsurgical cosmetic procedures were performed in the U.S.—almost a 200 percent increase since 1997. Still, the plethora of beauty-enhancing options, while exciting, is also confusing and a bit overwhelming; we all know that bad procedures can happen to good people. Your safest strategy: Go with doctors at the top of their fields. Here is a select list of some of the country’s finest aesthetic physicians working today, as well as a brief overview of the state-of-the-art developments occurring in their offices.
PLASTIC SURGERY
DR. SHERRELL ASTON
728 Park Avenue
212-249-6000
When France’s face of beauty, Catherine Deneuve, finally decided that even her flawless visage needed some refreshing, she reportedly turned to Aston for assistance. As a general rule, he says, “it’s difficult for me to evaluate a face and not see a place to augment with fat.” One area that he often focuses on: the eye. “If you look at a younger person’s face, the lower lid blends into the cheek,” he observes. “In older patients, I add fat to the tear trough, which helps recreate this effect.” Aston prides himself on performing work that is both skillful and subtle. “In earlier facelifts, you could see a scar and often a raised hairline, which I don’t find very elegant,” he says. “My incision is totally within the hairline.”
DR. DAN BAKER
65 East 66th Street
212-734-9695
Why do you think a well-known New York designer has begun to look more like her own daughter? Baker may be the reason. Besides that fashion mogul, the surgeon is said to have perked up everyone from Madonna to a host of politicos. These days, when one of his patients is in for a lift, Baker makes a point of going above and beyond: He performs fat grafts to restore volume, inserts fillers for stub- born furrows, and resurfaces the skin to erase fine lines. And the results have staying power. “Face-lifts used to last 8 to 10 years. Now they can last 10 to 15,” he assures.
DR. SHARON GIESE
114 East 61st Street
212-421-3400
Giese is best known for her “natural lift,” a minimally invasive alternative to a face-lift that melts away neck and jowl fat. She says that the procedure can buy patients an extra five years before they might feel the need for traditional surgery. When women come to her and tell her.
DR. ALAN MATARASSO
1009 Park Avenue
212-249-7500
Ready to soften furrows but anxious about the results? For a patient who feels uncertain about injectables, Matarasso will first use water to plump out her face so that she can see the effect. He’s also one cosmetic surgeon who is not hasty about wielding a scalpel. Matarasso recently turned to fillers in the nose as an easier way to correct imperfections like bumps and over-scooped profiles without resorting to an operation. “It’s a five-minute procedure!” he says. As for the body, “I combine liposuction with a tummy tuck,” and he’s using new silicone and saline breast implants that have a more natural appearance.
DR. DAVID ROSENBERG
115 East 61st Street
212-832-8595
A strong believer in not waiting until things are desperate before taking action, Rosenberg likes to attack the areas that bother his patients as soon as they notice them. “If a patient comes in with a loose neck or a little jowling, we don’t have to wait for all the skin to descend and we can go ahead and target those spots,” he says. “Smaller surgical procedures are good because they’re less taxing for the patient, physically and emotionally.” Besides removing bags and adding fat around the eyes, he usually tightens the muscle, too. “Doing that can also highlight the cheek- bones,” he maintains.
DERMATOLOGY
DR. DAVID COLBERT
119 Fifth Avenue
212-533-8888
Laser PRP, or platelet-rich plasma, is the latest innovation offered here. After Colbert preps a patient’s face with a light source, he injects her skin with her own blood platelets, which are rich in growth factor and can give the skin a more youthful texture. Two other new techniques employed by Colbert: administering micro-fat injections to fill hollows around the eyes and using the ultrasound-based Ulthera to tighten the skin.
DR. BRUCE KATZ
60 East 56th Street
212-688-5882
“It’s the holy grail,” declares Katz about the search for a procedure that will eliminate cellulite forever. While he and the rest of the world wait for a silver-bullet solution, he’s using Cellulaze, a treatment with a split beam that works in multiple directions. “You can aim it down to help melt fat, sideways to cut the fibrous bands that cause skin indentations and up to stimulate collagen under the surface,” he says.
DR. HOWARD SOBEL
960 Park Avenue
212-288-0060
“After you pass a certain age, freckles are no longer cute. They’re associated with looking older,” Sobel says. He favors a fractional laser to even out skin tone. His filler of choice for jaws and cheeks is calcium based Radiesse. And Sobel thinks that Botox isn’t just for frown lines—he uses it on the neck and the nose, too. “With liposuction, Sobel wants his patients to participate in the process. “I stand them up at the end of the procedure so that gravity can take effect, and we look in the mirror together to determine any final touch-ups.”
COSMETIC DENTISTRY
DR. LARRY ROSENTHAL
30 East 76th Street
212-794-9600
Rosenthal is an enthusiastic proponent of new, life-like crowns and veneers. “They are layered in colors, so they’re brighter yet more natural-looking,” he says. “They really end up enhancing the face.” Another innovation: Dental impressions will soon be taken digitally, so goodbye to mouthfuls of gook.
DR. LANA ROZENBERG
8 East 63rd Street
212-265-7724
Veneers that require little preparation are available at
the office of Rozenberg (who has brightened the smiles of Scarlett Johansson and Kristin Davis). “You only have to roughen the teeth, not file
them all the way down. They are thin, translucent and very pretty,” she raves. She’s also using fillings made of a resin composite (instead of porce- lain) because they’re softer on a patient’s bite. As for whitening, she has the new Zoom 4<, a machine that can be adjusted depending on the sensitivity of a patient’s teeth. Finally, for gummy smiles, she has devised “gummouflage,” which entails her making a small suture inside the lip to minimize the gums without major surgery.
BEVERLY HILLS
PLASTIC SURGERY
DR. LAWRENCE KOPLIN
465 North Roxbury Drive
310-277-3223
While most aesthetic surgeons choose to reserve fat injec- tions for treating larger areas of the face and body, Koplin also uses it to address fine lines in shallower areas. “It’s a great alternative to peeling or burning the skin, which leaves the skin red and requires some recovery time,” he says. “Injecting fat is actually good for the skin, rejuvenating it by improving blood supply, thickness and oxygenation.” Out of all the body parts he sees, the one that he approaches most aggressively is the neck. “I see a lot of people whose faces look really great, but their necks are a problem,” he reports. “To fix them, I usually go past the traditional muscles that most surgeons address.”
DR. NORMAN LEAF
436 North Bedford Drive
310-274-8001
One of Hollywood’s best- known beauty docs, Leaf has started deploying the tip of a laser to help melt fat and tighten skin under the chin. When performing most breast augmentations, particularly revisions, he now places a layer of Strattice (a matrix made from pig skin) between the implant and a patient’s skin, to achieve better results. “It supports the implant, and it reduces wrinkling,” he says.
DR. ANDREW ORDON
465 North Roxbury Drive
310-777-3438
Ordon, a cohost on TV’s The Doctors, declares: “The new thing is magnetic fields!” And the most cutting-edge device in that category is the Venus Freeze machine, a non- invasive device that combines magnetic and radio waves to tighten the skin on the face and the body. “It melts fat, too, and there’s very little pain,” he maintains.
DERMATOLOGY
DR. HAROLD LANCER
440 North Rodeo Drive
310-278-8444
Lancer likes to start his patients on a two-to-six-week home prep program to exfoliate their skin. “I always try
to rehabilitate them this way first,” explains the cosmetic dermatologist who counts Oprah, Victoria Beckham and Kim Kardashian among his clients. His specialties include scarless removal of skin-cancer growths, fixing scars and correcting discolorations. To rejuvenate the skin, he’s using a newly released version of Ulthera, which, he assures, is half as uncomfortable as the somewhat forbidding original.
COSMETIC DENTISTRY
DR. BILL DORFMAN
2080 Century Park East
310-277-5678
The latest cosmetic dentistry trend seen by Dorfman, the practitioner responsible for the enviable grins of Usher and Jessica Simpson? A shift toward conservative approaches, like no-prep or minimal-prep porcelain veneers or bleaching, instead of traditional veneers. “Teeth were being made too white,” he says.And in case a fear of needles keeps you from more intensive procedures, Dorfman has the DentalVibe, a machine that delivers vibrations to an injection area, eliminating pain.
DR. ROBERT RIFKIN
414 North Camden Drive
310-205-0010
Rifkin takes his patients’ veneers very seriously: Before- hand, he does a facial analysis in order to figure the best length and shape for that person. “Proportion is extremely important,” he notes.
DALLAS
PLASTIC SURGERY
DR. JENNIFER CATHER
9101 North Central Expressway
214-265-1818
Cather prides herself on constantly coming up with new, less invasive strategies. “You know how when you look at children, they have cute upturned noses?” she asks. “I can give you that with a little Botox.” She likes to deploy the filler Radiesse to smooth the cleavage and hyaluronic acid to rejuvenate hands. Another Cather technique: “I put hyaluronic acid in the ear lobe to make it plumper and less saggy. That even makes diamond earrings look better!” Leave it to a Dallas doctor to come up with that one.
DR. JEFF KENKEL
1801 Inwood Road
214-645-2353
“I use a lot of lasers and devices now,” says Kenkel, who is probably best known for his body lifts and tummy tucks. One of his current gizmos is the CoolSculpting machine, which helps destroy fat cells by freezing them.
DR. ROD ROHRICH
1801 Inwood Road
214-645-3119
A former president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, Dr. Rohrich is a big proponent of turning to fat to restore a youthful appearance in a patient. “We start losing fat in our faces at age 30,” he says, “so when it’s injected in the cheek area along with doing a lift, people look less ‘done.’”
PLASTIC SURGERY
DR. JULIO GALLO
1441 Brickell Avenue
305-624-0009
The Miami Institute for Age Management and Intervention is a group of beauty pros headed by Gallo. One area he’s exploring: cellular therapies like Laviv. A patch of skin is taken, cultured and used as an injectible. “It’s natural and completely compatible with a patient,” Gallo says.
DERMATOLOGY
DR. OSCAR HEVIA
550 Biltmore Way
305-443-9977
According to Hevia, non-surgical rejuvenation of the face is his forte. He has also pioneered a technique for freshening up the eye area. “It’s important
to create a smooth transition from the eye to the cheekbone without making the cheekbone stick out,” he says. He uses a small needle to fill hollows with Radiesse or hyaluronic acid. Hevia’s favorite new filler is Belotero. “You can really shape it,” he explains.
COSMETIC DENTISTRY
DR. JOSE BLANCO
7700 South Red Road
305-670-0352
Besides wielding the usual tools of a dentist, Blanco is employing Botox to reduce clenching in the jaw muscles. “Relaxing them can help prevent the teeth from grinding. A side benefit is you see a tapering of the face afterward,” he says. As for the teeth, he ac- tually adds slight imperfections to veneers to achieve a more natural look. “People want a better smile, but not everyone wants the bright white Hollywood smile.”
