About Our Before and After Pictures

You can tell a lot about a surgeon’s experience by the amount and quality of their before and after pictures.  A surgeon with 5-10 facelift (and or other procedures) is probably much less experienced than a surgeon with thousands of before and after pictures.  With almost 7,000 before and after images on our site, Dr. Niamtu exhibits the level of experience that most patients are looking for in a cosmetic surgeon.

How Do I Find all the Before & After Pictures?

Each page that contains before and after picture galleries has a floating Gallery icon at the bottom of the browser window.  Clicking on the Gallery icon will bring up the various picture galleries.  So, for example if you go to the eyelid page, you will see the icon and clicking on that will bring up the hundreds of eyelid before and after photos.  Each procedure page that has before and after pictures will have the Gallery icon.

The galleries have numerous pages which can be viewed by clicking on the page numbers at the bottom or each gallery (shown in the red circle above).


Before and after pictures have long been the standard to show changes from cosmetic surgery. Unfortunately, many surgeons take very few steps to standardize their photography. Dr. Niamtu personally devotes extreme time and effort to standardize the before and after images on this site. We have invested painstaking efforts to keep the poses, lighting and sizes similar on all photographs. We are extremely grateful for the hundreds of patients on this site who have allowed us to use their images to educate other patients. Without them, it would be much more difficult to illustrate post operative changes. You may notice that some patients may have makeup on in their “after” pictures and not in their before pictures. This is not done in any means to be deceptive and is a very common situation for all surgeons. Although all of the pictured patients have given us permission to use their pictures, many of them do not desire to have post operative images showing them without makeup. We duly respect the wishes of our patients and again thank them for participating in our web site.

You may notice that some patients have “shiny” skin in their post operative images. This is especially common for the skin resurfacing pictures. The reason for this is that part of our goal for all cosmetic patients is medically based, life time skin care. Some of the patients shown are in the midst of skin rejuvenation programs and may be wearing moisturizers or other skin care products that appear “shiny” on some pictures.

Finally, we have attempted to categorize the results in the most simple way. Some patients have had single procedures while others have had multiple procedures. In other words, a patient shown on the facelift page may have also had eyelid surgery and vice versa.

Dr. Niamtu is a surgeon, not a professional photographer and it is his sincere desire to provide the most standardized images that can be taken in the realm of a busy cosmetic surgery practice and we think we excel in this more than 99.9% of practices who take pictures.

Also take note that although we only post a small fraction of our actual cases, we have hundreds of times the number of images that most surgeons have on their sites.  Always keep in mind the experience of your surgeon when considering cosmetic facial surgery.

Some of Dr. Niamtu’s Publications on Clinical Photography

Niamtu J. The Impact of Deceptive Photography on Our Profession. Plast Surg Prac. 2011; 21(10):26-28.

Niamtu J  Clinical Photography 9in) Cosmetic facial surgery Niamtu (ed), St. Louis, 2011, Mosby Elsevier. Pg 18-29

Niamtu J.  Clinical Photography Pg. 87-95. Saving and Archiving Images pg 113-118
In: Perfect Medical Presentations, Irwin & Terberg. Churchill & Livingstone, London 2004

Niamtu J. Image is everything: Pearls and pitfalls of digital photography and PowerPoint presentations for the cosmetic surgeon. Dermatol Surg 2004;30:81-91

Niamtu  J. Techno pearls for digital image management.
Dermatol Surg. 2002 Oct;28(10):946-50.

Niamtu J.  Digital Photography In: Textbook of Facial Rejuvenation The Minimally Invasive Combination Approach Editor: Nick Lowe, MD “Digital Imaging in Cosmetic Surgery” 2000, Martin Dunitz, London Pg 307-319