In my opinion and long experience, Scalpel Sculpting followed by Dermaplaning (if needed) would be the treatment of choice for removing flat moles--dark or lighter-colored--from any location, including the face. I have personally removed as many as a dozen at one time from the face.Although removing moles by any method from the face is likely to leave a small scar, scalpel sculpting, which involves no deep cutting or stitches has, in my experience, proven quite successful for achieving gratifying aesthetic results while leaving little, or often barely perceptible, scars.The technique, which I have been using for thirty years, involves "scultping the mole" off from the surrounding skin in a tangential fashion (i.e. not cutting deeply into the skin). Deep cutting will inevitably result in a scar, while superficial (horizontal) removal in this fashion largely avoids this. Elliptical and fusiform simply describe the resulting shape of a wound excision after cutting them out deeply and before the placement of the sutures.As an important aside, destructive modalities to simply destroy the mole, e.g. lasers, electrocautery, electrodessication or cryosurgery should not be performed since these simply destroy all the mole tissue and do not permit a small specimen to be sent to the lab to ensure that the mole removed was entirely benign.If necessary, following scalpel sculpting, the borders of the mole can then be smoothed and blended with the surrounding normal skin by "dermaplaning," a technique by which the edge of the scalpel is used to delicately abrade the skin. Properly done, the entire procedure, performed under local anesthesia, takes no more than three to five minutes. In most cases, the procedure is done at the time of the consultation.
