DR. WORLDWIDE GETS SOCIAL
DR. WORLDWIDE GET TO KNOW HIM
Frank Agullo, MD, FACS — known globally as Dr. WorldWide — is a double board-certified plastic surgeon in El Paso, Texas. He is a Clinical Associate Professor of Plastic Surgery at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center and Affiliate Professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. Specializing in preservation-based aesthetic surgery and the Deep Plane Facelift, he has been named a Castle Connolly Top Doctor for thirteen consecutive years and has a global social following of over 3.5 million across Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. He is the founder of Southwest Plastic Surgery and Plastic Surgery Studios.
Meet Dr.WWDR. WORLDWIDE GET TO KNOW HIM
Frank Agullo, MD, FACS is the plastic surgeon the world watches. Known globally as Dr. WorldWide, he has built one of the largest followings of any surgeon on the planet (over 3.5 million on Instagram @RealDrWorldWide) by pulling back the curtain on plastic surgery and showing what extraordinary results actually look like. Celebrities, influencers, and patients from across the United States and around the world make the trip to El Paso, Texas, because when you have seen the work up close, there is nowhere else to go. More than 80% of his patients travel from outside El Paso. The practice handles every detail of their journey.
Dr. Agullo is double board-certified, Mayo Clinic fellowship-trained, and a Clinical Associate Professor of Plastic Surgery at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. But credentials only tell part of the story. What sets him apart is a philosophy built on preservation: enhancing, restoring, and elevating what is already there rather than changing who you are. Not cookie cutter. Every plan is molded around the individual patient's desires, their anatomy, their life.
That philosophy drives every decision in the operating room. His Motiva Preserve breast augmentations deliver results that feel as natural as they look. His deep plane and endoscopic deep plane facelifts turn back time without announcing themselves. His Supercharged BBL has been refined, published, and presented on international stages. And his ability to combine face and body procedures in a single operative session is a capability few surgeons in the world can offer safely at his level.
The same philosophy applies outside the OR. Forget synthetic fillers. Dr. Agullo restores volume with regenerative grafts including Alloclae, Lipoderma, exosomes, and platelet-derived growth factors. Recovery is treated as part of the result: lymphatic massages, scar management, and Elixir MD LED light therapy ensure that what happens after surgery is as intentional as what happens during it.
Castle Connolly Top Doctor for eleven consecutive years. Texas Super Doctors Hall of Fame. Best Plastic Surgeon in El Paso for thirteen consecutive years. Aesthetic Everything Top Plastic Surgeon 2026. Founding Vice President and President of the World Association of Gluteal Surgeons, where he helped write the global safety standards for gluteal surgery.
The results are daily. The standard is uncompromising. The philosophy is simple: #MakeItHappen. #HappyIsBeautiful. #StayBeautiful.
#PlasticSurgeryIsMyPassion
GLAMOUR SHOTS
Plastic Surgery is a very personal choice and a unique experience for every individual who chooses to undergo a change, be it a discreet or major surgery. The one thing in common for my patients though is that they experience an inner transformation which ultimately shines through as confidence in themselves. Confident is Beautiful!
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- Posted on: August 6th 2026
- Category: Facelift
Women’s Journal put the scar-free facelift on its July cover. Here is what the cover story got right, and what I tell surgeons and patients about the ponytail lift.
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- Posted on: August 6th 2026
- Category: Facelift
The July issue of Women’s Journal is their Face Issue. The cover is me, arms crossed, in a #StayBeautiful shirt, next to a quote I have said in the operating room more times than I can count: the best results are the ones no one can point to.
Strange feeling, seeing your own sentence printed in serif type on a magazine rack. Also a useful one. Because the story they chose to tell is the story I have been trying to get patients to hear for two years.
Not a new machine. Not an injectable. A facelift you cannot see.
What the Cover Story Actually Covers
The piece, written by Adriana Sinclair, is about the ponytail lift, which is the nickname for what I perform as a total endoscopic deep plane facelift. The name comes from the incision placement. The openings sit so far back inside the hairline that a patient can pull her hair into a high ponytail or a bun without showing a single mark.
No cut in front of the ear. No scar tracing the earlobe. None of the tells that made facelifts recognizable for fifty years.
Instead of lifting skin, I thread an endoscope, a camera thinner than a pencil, beneath the surface and reposition the deeper layers of the face: the brow, the midface, the jawline. The skin comes along because the foundation under it moved, not because I pulled on it.
If you want the full technical walk-through, I wrote it up in April in The Facelift You Can’t See. The Women’s Journal piece is the patient-facing version of that argument.
Tension Is the Enemy
Here is the opinion that runs through everything I do to a face. Tightening skin and adding tension is what creates the pulled, wind-blown look every patient says they are terrified of. Skin is a cover, not a scaffold. Treat it like a scaffold and it tells on you.
The deep plane approach, open or endoscopic, moves the structural layer and lets the skin settle where it belongs. That is why the results read as rested instead of redone. It is also why they hold. Repositioned tissue stays put in a way stretched skin never will.
Surgeons argue about plenty inside this space. How deep, how wide, on whom. I have been in those rooms, including at The Aesthetic Meeting in Boston this spring. But the direction of the field is not really in dispute anymore. Deep plane won.
Training With the Man Who Invented It
The cover story spends time on something I insist on being transparent about: where I learned this.
The ponytail lift was created by Dr. Chia Chi Kao in Santa Monica. I took his intermediate course in Pittsburgh, then applied to the advanced Ponytail Academy, the invitation-only program held at his own operating suite in Santa Monica, and was accepted.
Those days are not lecture-hall days. Cadaver lab on the midface. Live demonstrations of endoscopic tissue elevation. Long arguments about candidacy, because knowing who not to operate on is most of the job.
I brought all of it back to my AAAASF-accredited practice in El Paso, where it joined what Mayo Clinic fellowship training and twenty years of facial surgery had already built. That stack matters. A technique is only as good as the hands and the judgment around it.
Who the Ponytail Lift Is For, and Who It Is Not
Surgeon to reader, candidly: this operation is not for everybody, and any surgeon who tells you otherwise is selling.
The endoscopic version shines for patients who want the brow, midface, and jawline lifted discreetly, typically earlier in the aging curve, before heavy jowling and significant loose skin take over. For a patient with a lot of skin excess, a traditional open deep plane facelift remains the stronger tool, and I offer both, which keeps me honest. When you only own a hammer, every consult looks like a nail.
Recovery between the two is similar. Both rely on repositioning deeper tissue rather than surface tension, which is exactly why both are built to last.
Why a Magazine Cover Matters to Patients in El Paso
There is a line in the piece I want to underline. El Paso used to be a city people left for this kind of surgery. That has reversed. More than eight in ten of my facelift patients now travel to El Paso from out of town, from across Texas and the rest of the country.
A national cover story is not why they come. They come for the work. But the cover is a signal that the work happening on the border is being noticed at the national level, and I am proud of that for my city, not just for my practice. I see patients in English and Spanish, often in the same hour, and that bilingual, binational room is part of what makes this practice what it is.
Thirteen straight years as Best Plastic Surgeon in El Paso. Castle Connolly Top Doctor thirteen consecutive years. Texas Super Doctors Hall of Fame. Those lines have lived on my CV for a while. Seeing the philosophy behind them on a newsstand is new.
The Quote I Will Stand Behind
“The best results are the ones no one can point to.”
That is the whole preservation-first argument in eleven words. If someone can tell you had a facelift, something went wrong: too much tension, too much volume, wrong plane, wrong patient. The win condition is a colleague saying you look well rested and meaning it.
Women’s Journal put that sentence on a cover. My job is to keep making it true one face at a time.
Ready to Talk?
If the cover story raised questions about your own face, let’s answer them properly, in person. Call Southwest Plastic Surgery at (915) 590-7900, text my consult line at 1-866-814-0038, or book through agulloplasticsurgery.com. Find me as @RealDrWorldWide on Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, @Agullo on X, or @AgulloPlasticSurgery on Facebook. #StayBeautiful
Companion reads: the patient-focused version on agulloplasticsurgery.com and the practice story on swplasticsurgery.com.
- Posted on: August 6th 2026
- Category: Body, Editorial
Bulging again after a tummy tuck? The fascia stretches everywhere, not just the midline. How a triple plication revision retightens the whole wall.
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- Posted on: August 6th 2026
- Category: Body, Editorial
“From your photos, it seems that you still have abdominal wall laxity, and when you lay down, this looks like it’s corrected. It also seems like you still have some excess subcutaneous fat between the skin and the muscle.”
That is me, on a virtual consultation last week, reading two photos a patient sent through my tummy tuck revision page. She had her tummy tuck a few years ago in another city. Standing, the abdomen still pushes forward. Lying down, flat.
She asked me if her first surgery failed. Not exactly. It stopped short.
The Part Nobody Repaired
Here is what I told her next, word for word:
“I see patients like you routinely, where the diastasis was repaired, that’s just the separation between the rectus muscles. But during pregnancy, or when patients gain weight and then lose it, the fascia is stretched throughout the abdomen, not just between the rectus muscles.”
The first surgeon fixed the midline. The stretch was everywhere. That is the whole story of most revision consultations, and it is why the bulge survives a technically successful operation.
She had also been working her core for two years on a trainer’s advice. “Performing core exercises will strengthen the muscle, but will not tighten the fascia.” I have written about that trap before, the sit up lie. Revision patients are its most frustrated victims, because they already did everything right once.
The Retightening
“That’s why I often recommend performing a triple plication, where I plicate from the sternum to the pubis, bringing together the fascia of the rectus, and I also plicate the obliques to the lateral edge of the rectus. This is called a triple plication, which in essence creates an internal corset, or waist trainer.”
Regular readers know my analogy for the triple plication. If you look at any waist trainer at any store, you’ll see that there are multiple seams in the waist trainer. Essentially, most surgeons are just making a waist trainer with one seam, versus using multiple seams, in this case three, to bring in the waistline.
In a revision, those two extra seams retighten the fascia the first operation never touched, laterally over the obliques, and they add something the patient did not have even on her best day after the first surgery: a waistline.
The triple plication is something I have published on. I can’t take the credit for inventing it, as it is something the Brazilian plastic surgeons described many years ago. But somehow, a lot of plastic surgeons did not implement it into their procedures. I’ve been performing it for more than seventeen years, which is exactly how long revision patients have been finding their way to my office after one-seam operations.
The Fat, the Skin, the Scar
Remember the second finding in her photos, the excess subcutaneous fat between the skin and the muscle. The wall repair alone does not fix that. All my tummy tucks include liposuction, especially of the anterior abdomen, waistline, and lower back, and I often combine it with Renuvion J-Plasma for skin tightening. A scar that healed wide or rides too high gets revised in the same operation.
So the revision is really three corrections in one: retighten the wall, remove the residual fat, and improve the scar.
Recovery, Second Time Around
Patients brace for a worse recovery than the first surgery. Then I tell them my numbers. I use Exparel injected into what we call a TAP block, which numbs the area for three days, and I’m happy to say that fifty percent of my patients experience no pain whatsoever. Most patients recover in two weeks to get back to normal activity, and six weeks for exercise, running, jumping, and heavy lifting.
Patients do feel a tighter abdomen after surgery. This time it stays tight standing up, which is the entire point.
The Two-Photo Test
Standing, then lying down. If the bulge disappears when you lie flat, the wall is the likely problem, and a wall problem has a surgical answer. If it does not disappear, the answer may be liposuction, or skin, or something else, and I will tell you which.
I trained at the Mayo Clinic and I teach plastic surgery at Texas Tech. Revisions are where that training earns its keep, because the first operation already spent the easy options.
Ready to Talk?
If your tummy tuck left you flatter lying down than standing up, send me the photos. Call (915) 590-7900, text 1-866-814-0038, or book online. #StayBeautiful
@RealDrWorldWide on Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, @Agullo on X, or @AgulloPlasticSurgery on Facebook.
Companion reads: the clinical revision guide on agulloplasticsurgery.com, and the practice overview at swplasticsurgery.com.
