Dr. Julius Few Opens Plastic Surgery Practice in Santa Monica

After eight years of traveling back and forth to see select Hollywood clients in Los Angeles, the Chicago-based plastic surgeon Dr. Julius Few has quietly opened a satellite office in Santa Monica and he is already booked into June. Few, a specialist in eye surgery and thread lifting, offers surgical and non-surgical treatments, with a focus on the face and breasts. He has made a name for his subtle, natural approach.  

Close friend Gwyneth Paltrow has long referred to Few as the “holistic plastic surgeon” and the pair collaborated to develop the Goop Beauty Youth-Boost Peptide Serum ($150), launched in July 2023.

In February, his own clean and clinically tested eponymous Dr. Few skincare line of seven products ($85-$195) debuted at select Neiman Marcus stores and drfewskincare.com. The vegan formulations include a Gentle Exfoliating Cleanser, Supreme Oil Serum, Moisture Complete, Moisture Complete Sheer, Rejuvenating Eye Cream + SPF, Tinted Mineral Sunscreen SPF30 and Clean Retinol.

Few speaks exclusively to THR about his new LA outpost (1301 20th St., Suite 350, Santa Monica; 310-861-7248) as well as his new skincare line, his work with Sat Hari (the IV nurse, jewelry designer and co-founder of God’s True Cashmere with Brad Pitt), his patented “stackable treatments” method, how Paltrow coined her description of him and more.

Congratulations on your new LA office. I understand that you are already booked up!

Yes, I’ve been blessed to have patients fly in from LA every week or every other week to see me in Chicago. For the past eight years, I was only seeing patients by referral in a remote spot in Beverly Hills that was too boutiquey to have the general public coming through. I was really the only person in the country with the kind of experience I had doing thread lifting, and I did the definitive papers on it, so that’s how it started. For lots of reasons, I tried to keep my practice under the radar. Ultimately, we sent a notice to my celebrity base in LA and my patients in Chicago, letting them know that I was going to open the office in Santa Monica; last month and this month filled up in like a week and a half. So it’s been an overwhelmingly positive response. Things have continued by word of mouth.

What would you say makes you stand out in the field?

If I think about it practically, I’d say my approach is more naturalistic or conservative. So I think why I’ve been fortunate enough to have a number of celebrities call me their person is because they know I will not change their aesthetic. I’m only going to enhance and preserve, but not change. Actually, it’s harder to be more disciplined and not let your vanity as a plastic surgeon or dermatologist get into the mix. Because part of you, as an artist, has a desire for the art to be seen. And my art is decidedly designed to not be seen. So I’ve managed to take that part of the ego out of it.

I’ve focused my 25 years of practice on trying to approach people thoughtfully. I can tell you a story. I can’t say who it is, but I had major studio heads reach out to me and say they were going into production and one of their stars really wanted me to do threads, and so they made very special arrangements to have me come into town to treat them in a very discreet way. Some of my patients have called me a secret weapon.

Dr. Few Supreme Oil Serum

THR has previously covered thread lifts — how often do you have to redo them or when do you decide on that versus a facelift?

There are two categories. For the entertainment space, it is decidedly in a staged fashion. Typically it’s someone who has early changes, where I’m addressing the face and neck in a six- to nine-month interval. I’ll do one component, where they will not have any sign I was there, other than maybe that day, and follow up with a targeted moving-down-the-face strategy. That’s the super high-profile person. For the general public, I can treat multiple areas with very limited down time, meaning they may show a little dimple for two to four days, easily hidden with makeup. Bruising is very rare. Results typically last about two to two-and-a-half years.

Part of the reason that I agreed to see the general public in LA is because I’m out there doing my selective work on this entertainment group, but a number of them are off-cycle so they don’t really need my hand. My cardinal rule is not over-treating. So that’s why it made sense.

Dr. Few Exfoliating Gentle Cleanser

Was it Gwyneth who coined the “holistic plastic surgeon” title for you and how did that come about?

Yes, it happened almost simultaneously with a medical conference where I was lecturing about the integration of ‘inside to out’ beauty. It dates back to eight years ago, when I first started seeing patients on a referral-only basis in LA They were primarily people that Gwyneth knew and exclusively in the entertainment or entertainment-related space. I started collaborating with Sat Hari — who is an Eastern medicine expert and does IV drips for the rich and famous — on protocols that were next-level and saw results that I never would have expected with my work alone. I quickly realized how I can look at things from inner to outer to complement some of my treatments.

Gwyneth is in the know about all of these things and, in her mind, I became the first plastic surgeon really in the world to look at things [that way]; like if you do a glutathione drip after a thread lift, you’re going to potentially get a better result than if you don’t. So I started to consider these modalities as biohackers, if you will. That’s why Gwyneth — along with Jean Godfrey-June [Goop’s executive beauty director] — coined “holistic plastic surgeon.”

Dr. Few Rejuvenating Eye + SPF 15

So interesting. Sat Hari co-founded God’s True Cashmere in 2022 and didn’t she used to tour with the Red Hot Chili Peppers as an intravenous ozone nurse?

Yes, she toured with them internationally and just finished, actually, at the beginning of this year.

And you’re known for this patented “stackable” method of treatment. Can you explain that concept?

There is the saying that ‘necessity is the mother of invention.’ When people started to travel to see me in Chicago, oftentimes they would need-slash-want more than one specific thing treated non-surgically. So out of the necessity for being efficient, but at the same time not wanting to have any risk, I thought about how to treat various levels of tissue at the same time to give the most bang for the buck. For example, filler to restore volume under the skin or under muscles of the face, laser to treat the skin’s surface, and relaxing or reducing movement in areas that wrinkle or furrow.

Conventional thought, going back about 15 years ago, was that you could not do all this in the same setting. So I came up with algorithms that I did clinical testing for and ultimately wrote The Art of Combining Surgical and Non-Surgical Techniques in Aesthetic Medicine and basically that changed the game. You would never go to a dermatologist’s or plastic surgeon’s office now and say, “I’m going to have Botox today and I will come back in two weeks or a month to have filler.” Whereas 15 years ago, that was the only way it was done. So I created this concept of stackable treatments. I first wrote a paper on it in 2000 and ultimately that became a reality.

What are the treatments that you most often stack?

My tried-and-true approach has been synergistically combining skin resurfacing through laser with volumizing. An analogy would be that it’s easier to shave when the skin is taut than if it’s relaxed and has wrinkles. So the idea of adding volume in advance or at the same time as doing a laser makes the laser work better. Or doing non-surgical skin tightening like Sofwave, focused ultrasound, at the same time I’m doing thread lifting on someone who has much more severe sagging. It’s less about the specific treatment and more about the concepts.

If you have a choice between lifting or filling, it’s better to lift than fill. If you have a choice between treating a wrinkle or a pigment in the skin, it’s often better to treat the pigment.

Dr. Few Tinted Mineral Sunscreen SPF 30

What lasers are you currently using?

I absolutely love Halo laser and I have a face, neck and chest case in my clinic in LA. I think that’s the gold standard for minimally invasive but deeper-level laser resurfacing. To me, it’s been a game-changer treatment, especially for sun-damaged, wrinkled skin or age-related changes.  Broadband light or BBL has replaced intense pulsed light or IPL. For very diverse skin types and limited down time, I love the Moxi laser, which is similar to Halo but more pigment friendly, so you can treat my skin tone or very fair skin, as well. Those are the workhorses that we use every day.

Let’s talk about your new Dr. Few skincare line. How are your products special?

We have created a new category, which is clean but clinical, in terms of testing. There are two categories of clinical testing: internal proprietary testing and testing that is subjected to peer-reviewed consideration and publication. I’ve chosen the latter. The mechanisms of action for our components have been published, including the Youth-Boost Peptide Serum that I made for Gwyneth. We did the research in Chicago, blinded investigators reviewed the results, and we had controlled subjects. Ultimately the research was published in the number one cosmetic plastic surgery journal in the world. There are no other clean skincare products on the market that have done the clinical testing and published them in peer review journals.

As you know, California has been the first state to be stringent about what beauty  products can have in them. So all our products are made in California and they’re vegan, cruelty-free and clinically clean with sustainable production and packaging. We also put a ton of energy into recycled glass packaging with an airless pump delivery, so as not to cause degradation of product. I have several patents to transcutaneous medicine in my name, so I brought that rigor to an eco-friendly approach.

Goop Beauty GoopGenes Youth-Boost Peptide Serum

The term “clean beauty” can be used a bit loosely and you also want products that are effective.

A thousand percent. That is where the match was made in heaven with Goop. Gwyneth has world-class chemists working with her team. They rigorously sample and test all our products for clean designation. Our role has been doing the clinical testing to go with it. Our latest paper is under final review for publication right now, using the stackable skincare approach.

In the big picture, there are a ton of options out there, but I think in terms of deliverables we are in a category of our own. Really where this started was coming up with a clean retinol. Goop’s lead buyer said that they would never carry a retinol because they didn’t believe it was even possible to make a retinol that was clean. So we made something that defines a category and we’re the reason that retinol is now sold on Goop. My eye serum that has an SPF, antioxidants and peptide technology (a non-retinol product with enhanced cell turnover capabilities) also does not exist on the market.