Beauty Series #2: Hit and Run Beauty

Summer Hardy (00:01):
Welcome to Park Avenue Plastic Surgery Class, the podcast where we explore controversies and breaking issues in plastic surgery. I'm your co-host, Summer Hardy, a clinical assistant at Bass Plastic Surgery in New York City. I'm excited to be here with Dr. Lawrence Bass, Park Avenue plastic surgeon, educator and technology innovator. This is another episode in our beauty series, the series where we present and discuss Dr. Bass's advice and philosophy about your beauty and how to put together your beauty program. The title of today's episode is Hit and Run Beauty. Okay, Dr. Bass, you've piqued my curiosity again. What is this episode about? What is hit and run beauty?

Dr. Lawrence Bass (00:40):
We've touched on this issue before in the Power of One episode, the idea of what kind of relationship you want with your aesthetic provider. Obviously I'm biased. Being a fully trained surgeon, certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery with 30 years of experience practicing, most of it on Park Avenue, I've got a certain outlook on how things work ideally, and the way my practice works, I have a certain kind of relationship with my patients. There's a certain way those of us working on Park Avenue in New York City tend to do things.

Summer Hardy (01:24):
That makes sense. So how does that contrast with hit and run?

Dr. Lawrence Bass (01:28):
Basically, it's the opposite. What I mean by hit and run beauty is that treatment you get with very little consultation, very little physical examination and assessment before the treatment and very little aftercare.

Summer Hardy (01:46):
Got it. So can you give me an example?

Dr. Lawrence Bass (01:49):
Well, let me give you a metaphor and an example. So the metaphor is when you're walking through the ground floor of a department store and you walk past the people who are spraying with perfume, I mean, they're going to give you a little shot of perfume on your way by if you want it, and you may like the perfume or not like it, but it's not going to be very carefully applied. The quantitation of the application is going to be very inexact or imprecise. They're just going to blast you with a little bit of perfume as you sweep on by. That's not really the way I think we want our medical aesthetic treatments to be given to us. And so the example that you asked for is a Botox or a filler injection and more of a storefront care kind of place. Sometimes that can be a different provider each time. It may not be a very experienced provider. It might be. It is probably a very quick and focused very basic treatment. So part of the problem with that is that there's possibly less precision and nuance and no one's looking at the big picture how that treatment or the feature being addressed fits with your other features and what's changing in your face over time. So it's just hit and run. You get the treatment and you keep moving.

Summer Hardy (03:26):
I'm starting to understand that idea, but is hit and run treatment always a mistake?

Dr. Lawrence Bass (03:31):
Not at all. I just personally think you get a lot less than you get in a full service setting with an ongoing relationship with a plastic surgeon who can offer you all of the options, surgical and nonsurgical as they become necessary. Sometimes all it's needed is just a quick fix for the time being until a more extensive assessment can be made, or because your primary long-term plastic surgeon is not immediately available. So in those settings, sometimes a quick fix is just fine. It's not that it's necessarily bad, but if that's your only means of getting beauty treatments, aesthetic care, I think you're really limiting yourself.

Summer Hardy (04:21):
That makes a lot of sense. Can you tell me a bit more about what that provider relationship means?

Dr. Lawrence Bass (04:27):
The relationship means there's a more in-depth understanding of your aesthetic preferences, an in-depth understanding of how you respond to treatments based on what you've done before, what you might need now watching things change over years of time, and that gives you more precision in how those treatments are applied, whether they're surgical or non-surgical. The bottom line is your aesthetic care is not a commodity like a Big Mac, which is more or less the same anywhere you go. Your face and your aesthetic needs are unique, much more individual, and the care needs to be customized, not commoditized and dispensed over a drive thru. It's about a long-term dialogue with your plastic surgeon, how you age and your appearance and your preferences, and how those evolve over time. To use another word, this is about communication. Think of how you communicate when you get a Big Mac through the drive thru.

(05:42):
The communication is clipped and limited. It's hard to get a few words out and to have them heard on the other side and to understand the few words that come back at you. It's a very focused, limited communication. There's not much explaining, taking place, going either way. You explaining what you're looking for or the provider explaining what's involved in the treatment. The sound quality and the interface are poor, and therefore the messages often garbled and confused. The chances that you and the provider have the same mental picture of the aesthetic goal is much less likely than with a good sit down discussion face-to-face.

Summer Hardy (06:29):
That's really interesting. Something that I hadn't really considered before when seeking Care. So time for your takeaways, Dr. Bass. Will you share them with our listeners please?

Dr. Lawrence Bass (06:40):
To obtain the best results with your aesthetic care, I believe it's critical to have an ongoing relationship with an experienced plastic surgeon who can offer the following. Number one, a full range of options, surgical and non-surgical. Someone who knows your wants and aesthetic preferences, knows what your style is, so to speak. Someone who's watched you age and seen how things are changing over time. Your long-term plastic surgeon can tell you if your aging is stable, if it's speeding up, if there are obvious features that jump out and really need treatment. So this is kind of a reality check on how you look, and some patients are very connected to how they look. They understand every little change as it trickles in and other patients, they're missing how much has changed, and they're walking around with an image of themselves as a much younger adult. They kind of know intellectually that things are not exactly the same, but emotionally they haven't connected with how much things have changed.

(07:50):
So a reality check going either way with your surgeon, it's really time to jump on something because it's a very obvious feature or that really there's a little change there, but it's not very important, not worth it's chasing. That's very, very useful to have that second look or reality check. And what do you get in return for having this long-term relationship? I believe you get more precision in how the selected treatments and procedures are performed and a lot more nuance in detail. You get a more unified plan for what's needed and a more unified plan by definition is going to be more time efficient, more cost effective. The level of detail and precision with this quality, long-term, in-depth experience will be much more satisfying and much more likely to succeed in meeting all of your aesthetic goals, in my opinion, compared with having a hit and run beauty experience.

Summer Hardy (08:59):
Thank you, Dr. Bass, for sharing your perspective on how to avoid hit and run beauty. I'm sure all our listeners want to get the most results with the least input of time and money. Thank you for listening to the Park Avenue Plastic Surgery Class podcast. Follow us on Apple Podcasts, write a review and share the show with your friends. Be sure to join us next time to avoid missing all the great content that is coming your way. If you want to contact us with comments or questions, we'd love to hear from you. Send us an email at podcast@drbass.net or DM us on Instagram @drbassnyc.