In the outpatient clinic, we often encounter patients who ask: Doctor, is it better to remove the mole on my face surgically or to “dot” it with laser? Is there no scar after laser “spotting”, and will there be scars after surgery? Today, using my clinical experience, I would like to answer the question of what kind of facial moles should be removed by the beauty seekers. What kind of moles are suitable for excision? Some time ago, we removed a mole on the face of a male patient in his 30s, who came to the clinic with these same questions. He had a pigmented nevus about 20px in diameter on the back of his nose, slightly elevated, with clear, round-like borders and no visible hair on the surface, which was present at birth and did not grow significantly outward. There were also 5 or 6 small rice-grain-sized pigmented nevi growing scattered on his face and neck, with the surface flat against his skin. My recommendation for him was to have them surgically removed. Because the pigmented nevus on the back of his nose is relatively large, and if it is removed with laser or medicine, a small pit will be left in this location in the future, and when light shines on his face, this pit will become obvious due to uneven light reflection, especially when taking pictures. The human eye can easily catch this dark area of light, so it looks obvious from the visual perspective. The mark left after surgical excision is a line, and as time goes by, this line will become less and less obvious, because our skin has texture and folds, and plastic surgeons usually pay attention to the design of the incision to parallel the direction of the skin texture and folds, so in the future this line will be covered up by your skin texture and folds, which is equivalent to concealing from the visual perspective. Therefore, the line marks will be hidden from the visual perspective. Therefore, for pigmented moles on the face and neck with a diameter of more than 3mm (about the size of a small grain of rice), it is recommended to opt for surgical treatment. What kind of moles are suitable for laser removal? Smaller pigmented moles (less than the size of a grain of rice) will form a “dot” with the contraction of the wound after being removed by laser or medication, and visually they will not look very obvious, so both surgical excision and laser “dot” removal are suitable for such pigmented moles. Therefore, surgical excision and laser “spot” removal are both options for this type of pigmented mole. So if you have one large pigmented mole and several small scattered pigmented moles on your face, it is recommended to choose surgical excision to solve all of them at once, if there are only several small scattered pigmented moles on your face, then both methods can be chosen. Will there be scarring after mole removal? It is a normal function of human self-repair and self-protection. Plastic surgeons cannot eliminate the scar, but can make it narrower, thinner and hidden through our unique techniques. For larger pigmented nevi, the depth of invasion will reach the dermis, and the dermis must be removed to completely solve the problem, and if laser or medicine is used to remove the nevus, the fear of removing the depth of the nevus will often lead to recurrence. Moreover, repeated stimulation is not good for the nevus, and if you want to remove it completely, it will definitely leave a scar. As mentioned above, this pit-like scar is more visible than the linear scar. Before laser treatment and before surgical removal of the frontal nevus (note the postoperative effect of each color arrow). The patient chose laser treatment first, and the yellow arrow shows the pit-like scar left after laser treatment, which is more visible at a visual angle. The patient opted for surgical excision of the remaining facial nevi, with the red and purple arrows showing the barely noticeable linear scar left after excision and the yellow arrow showing the permanent pitted scar left after the previous laser treatment.