Dr. Ivona Percec picks up my call from San Diego, where she is attending a series of medical conferences, carving out time between sessions to discuss the evolving science and artistry of plastic surgery, as well as her commitment to education. Percec is a plastic surgeon at Penn Medicine whose work has remained rooted in academia as she continues to research and train residents. She is often found consulting back and forth between Philadelphia and her office at Bryn Mawr.
Art and creativity hold a very important place in medicine, especially in plastic surgery. “Plastic,” coming from the ancient Greek word “plastikos,” which means “to mold,” places the surgeon in the role of a sculptor tasked with restoring and reconstructing, whether for functional or non-functional purposes, any part of the human body.
Percec was born in Romania and has a rich family history steeped in art and science. She’s a fourth-generation academician—her parents both hold doctoral degrees in science and her grandfather was an artist and professor. Growing up, her home was filled with art, including her grandfather’s paintings salvaged from Romania shortly after the revolution. She has always felt the heavy presence of both scientific and artistic influences, which shaped her academic pursuits during her undergraduate studies at Princeton University in molecular biology and medieval history. Ultimately, the mesh guided her choice to specialize in plastic surgery. “I was one of these unicorns that easily transitioned between those worlds,” she says.
Percec has always found solace in manual work, where the flow state of mindfulness intertwines with creativity to spark feelings of pure happiness. From spending time on pottery and carpentry in high school to pruning the roses in her garden as a distinguished doctor in the field, she has always found peace in manual artistic tasks soliciting mindfulness, creativity, and appreciation for the aesthetic. It comes as no surprise that she felt right at home whether she was shadowing in the operating room as a teenager or carving ears in potatoes as a medical student. “When I’m doing an operation, no matter what it is, I’m ultra focused, ultra happy,” she explains.
Percec traces her interest in plastic surgery back to her time at the Laurel School in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where students were required to complete externships. In the meantime, she accidentally discovered through a misplaced pamphlet that her close friend had been quietly planning a rhinoplasty. When she asked her friend about it, the immense intrigue she felt for the procedure made everything fall into place, and she knew where she would be spending the six weeks of her externship: the plastic surgery operating room in the Cleveland Clinic. Percec discovered that she loved both the technological and artistic aspects of changing somebody's life for the better.
Throughout her career, she fully transitioned the research lab she opened at the start of her career in plastics from a wet science lab to a clinical lab. She studied facial metrics and designed new ways of studying the face as it ages. “We have to look at it with a new paradigm, with a new eye for overall wellness,” she says. For many people, plastic surgery can be a way to take care of their health, address issues that manifest through their family history, or attempt to restore a body part that experienced damage. She chose to remain in academia rather than open her own practice. She wanted to be a part of the education of medical students, as the mentorship they get is an important aspect of a more holistic way of helping the patient.
Having always been an introvert and better at one–to–one speaking rather than in large group settings, Percec never believed that she would be a fit for mentoring. However, “working with people individually has really allowed me to grow as a teacher and a mentor,” she says. This is a crucial aspect of properly training future generations, she explained, especially as many plastic surgeons and academicians are being lost to the private sector, leaving fewer to mentor the next wave of surgeons.
Even though patients today are more demanding thanks to higher medical literacy and rates of self–advocacy, surgery can sometimes be seen as a way for them to fit into an aesthetic trend. In these cases, Percec feels the obligation to refuse, citing her ethical principles and core values on the purpose of plastic surgery to help restore and improve one’s life quality rather than help them conform.
As social media puts forth new aesthetics, cosmetic demands worsen by the day. Patient outcomes are not being measured, and neither are consequences being taken into consideration. With that, Percec wants rigor to be brought back for the sake of patients who suffer over time. “I can’t in good faith and ethically do certain things,” she says. “I’m spending a lot more time undoing the harm that social media has done.”
She describes the availability of information online as a slippery slope, transitioning from increased information that benefits patients to misrepresentation of treatments and expectations, which can be neither mentally nor physically healthy. She sees a fine line between the benefits of this information and the distortions caused by social media, where many patients strive to resemble filtered versions of themselves. Navigating this dynamic is no easy task, which is why she remains deeply committed to education—not only for her patients but also for training residents to handle these difficult conversations.
“If you take a mirror image of a person and you double it up, that image is not as pretty as the original, which has some asymmetry.” From an artistic standpoint, faces have lights and shadows, and animation changes. “Smiles are not symmetric, and that’s okay because it’s pretty, it’s charming, it’s elegant,” she says. Yet, social media standards remain obsessed with symmetry.
When asked to look into the crystal ball to envision the future of plastic surgery, Percec expresses hope for an increase in the personalization of medicine, particularly regarding genetic background. She highlights the need for better medical personal accommodations for the patient and sees the importance of plastic surgery being used to enhance quality of life by prioritizing individual needs over conventional aesthetic trends.
“I love working with my hands and seeing an outcome and an impact on patients,” She says. For Dr. Percec, plastic surgery is “the interface of art and science.”
