Most of us have had the experience of seeing a presentation at a meeting or reading a journal article and thinking how great were the ideas and technique presented. We can see immediately the potential for adopting this technique and believe that it would be a fairly straightforward procedure that would yield results similar to those stated by the author. In fact, this is how we all have learned newer aesthetic surgery techniques over the years, particularly those of us who have been in practice for a long time. Many of the procedures we are doing today had not yet been developed or taught when we began our training. We depend on the evolutionary nature of acquiring surgical skills to constantly grow in our specialty. However, we have all experienced some pitfalls, including our inability to reproduce the results touted by the journal author or course instructor. If we understand the reasons for this, we will become more “careful shoppers” when adopting a new technique or redefining an old one. In the first place, some authors have used a …