One week after a U.S. breast implant manufacturer abruptly announced it had already ceased all operations, its digital footprint—spanning some 17 years—is rapidly disappearing from the Internet.
Ideal Implant Incorporated’s website has been replaced with an announcement on what liquidation means to patients and providers.
Its phone number points to a prerecorded message and accepts no voicemails.
Its attorney contact details are misprinted, making emails undeliverable.
Its social media content and profiles have all been deleted:
- YouTube
Pages of information seemingly important to patients’ questions, past promises, or possible recourse options are disappearing off of some providers’ websites, a few of whom had close relationships with the company.
Beyond updating its website, the company evidently made no effort to inform women with its implants that their warranties had become invalid overnight.
Throughout its history, Ideal Implant Inc was frequently promoted as “the plastic surgeons’ breast implant company.”
The company itself was once majority-owned by up to 120 board-certified and board-eligible plastic surgeons.
Early mention was also made of a trust fund that would protect patients in the event of an announcement like Friday’s.
With its founder and former CEO Robert S Hamas, several former employees, and the company’s liquidation attorney not responding to requests for comment or clarification over the course of a week, and records disappearing daily, our reporting was forced to rely on diverse data sources.
Late in our reporting process, with no answers forthcoming, we reached out also to the U.S. FDA three times by phone, whom we failed to hear from.
Here’s what we know and what we don’t, thus far.
Ideal Implant Incorporated announced last Friday, June 1, that it had ceased all operations and liquidated due to lack of finances.
The changes covered in the announcement and delivered with “deep regret,” had gone into effect two days earlier, at 5:00 pm on May 30.
Facing insufficient interest and orders, the company couldn’t maintain its operations or find an investor willing to keep it afloat, something it had been quietly trying to resolve for six or more months.
When that failed, patients’ warranties were suddenly void, and surgeons with the company’s implants still in stock—which had been paid for upfront—couldn’t return or refund them, the announcement said.
The 315-word statement, posted to the homepage of the company’s website, entirely replaced what just one day earlier was a sprawling record of superiority claims, study results, and warranty promises from a medical device manufacturing company in operation for more than 17 years.
The company’s website that day went dead, first displaying nothing at all, then live again, with a single page.
Reflecting a company in turmoil, the page, riddled with typographical errors, changed several times over the course of the afternoon.
FDA-required device tracking and adverse event reporting features appeared again by late afternoon.
Patient advocates and surgeons say the news was as fresh to them as it was to the women who once purchased—and still have—the company’s breast implants.
While HIPPA laws prevent a device manufacturer from receiving certain patient information without consent, an update on social media appears feasible and would have allowed for a forum of sorts—something one surgeon suggested as a solution for the unprecedented occasion.
Misprinting both his name and contact information, Ideal Implant Incorporated instead invited those with questions or concerns to contact its liquidation lawyer.
Attorney “Jerey” Rosenthal’s name was one of several errors corrected that afternoon.
Still not corrected a week later is the means of contacting that lawyer.
Seven days and several emails later to both attorney and founder, the error is still uncorrected, perhaps intentionally.
Ideal Implant Inc’s former owners and investors don’t want to hear from the hundreds or thousands of women it reneged on.
By the time news of the company’s nonexistence reaches them, their options will hopefully be expired.
“No surprise. Sad for all of the investors.”
Plastic surgeon, upon being informed that Ideal Implant, Inc. had gone under.
(Surgical Times began its reporting process objectively and impartially. Ideal Implant is a company we have long felt had both promise and a passion to build something better for women who wanted breast implants; views we shared with its founder by email. With no answers, comments, or corrections forthcoming, we concluded the quiet exit is likely intentional.)
“This is Ideal Implant Incorporated,” a recording on the company’s phone number says. “Unfortunately, we have had to cease operations and can longer supply implants. For further information, please see our website, IdealImplant.com. Thank you.”
The number accepts no messages.
Outside of the corporation’s website, Ideal Implant Inc has been diligently deleting much of its digital footprint.
Industry norms suggest that surgeons who don’t offer a particular cosmetic procedure also don’t have pages devoted to it on their website.
But a device manufacturer, whose implants are still in use by an estimated several thousand to tens of thousands of women?
Significant claims, important information, and all social media channels have been deleted.
The only surviving means of “conversing with” the company is a Google business profile.
It exists because Alphabet, Inc’s Google.com doesn’t allow a profile of its kind to be deleted.
The listing has been updated to read “Permanently Closed.”
Litigation is likely.
“I anticipate that more litigation may be expected in the future,” Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Dr. Sanjay Grover told NewBeauty magazine last Friday.
Dr. Grover (who is not a proponent of the defunct implants, nor at fault here) recommended that patients contact their plastic surgeons, and “engage in chat forums to share information.”
But the device manufacturer rapidly shut down any of its once-public channels where that discourse could have taken place.
It hopes patients will remain quiet.
A trust fund, formed for a failure like today’s.
The idea that a budding breast implant manufacturer would ever cease operations isn’t a new one.
In September 2020, board-certified plastic surgeon Dr. George Sanders asked:
“When a failure occurs, will the manufacturer still be in business to honor the lifetime warranty that covers the implant? Current saline implants are manufactured by billion dollar corporations whose financial longevity seems guaranteed. What about this start up company? Will it still be around in 10 years to honor the warranty when your IDEAL IMPLANT fails?”
Dr. Sanders wasn’t the only surgeon to consider this unlikely outcome.
Company founder Dr. Robert S Hamas, did, too.
Thus, his early creation of a trust fund that, according to available information, would serve to protect patients in the event of an announcement like Friday’s.
Or at least one that would be sold to patients on the virtues of those benefits.
In February 2018, Dr. Donald W. Hause, a proponent of the Ideal Implant, described the Trust Fund this way:
“…the Trust Fund will act as a financial protection plan to reduce your financial risk should Ideal Implant Incorporated cease operations. In that case, you could use your Trust Fund payment toward the cost of removal or replacement of your study implants.”
Other pages with predictions (and promises) of its kind have been deleted.
Search engine indexes suggest they existed a week ago.
(Inquiries about this trust fund went unanswered by company founder Dr. Robert Hamas.)
‘The plastic surgeon’s implant company:’ Founded, funded, and owned.
In the years between company founder Dr. Robert S Hamas’s 1992 flight to Aspen, Colorado—where turbulence and a Scotch on the rocks gave rise to visions of a breast implant whose internal baffles would reduce saline sloshing—and the company’s eventual liquidation, Hamas needed funding.
The surgeon’s mid-flight epiphany had coincided with an unprecedented event in implant history.
The FDA had just placed a moratorium on silicone breast implants, effective Jan. 7, 1992.
If Hamas could create a saline-filled implant that brought together the best of both worlds, the market would be ready for it.
(State records, however, show that Hamas filed to reserve the company’s eventual name on Dec. 20, 2005, less than a year before the FDA lifted its moratorium and again allowed silicone implants on the market. Silicone implants are used today in 82 percent of breast augmentation surgeries, and the industry as a whole is experiencing a decline in augmentation cases to the tune of a $500-million in lost surgeons’ fees per year.)
Then a Dallas plastic surgeon of 20-plus years, Hamas was affluent, but launching a brand-new breast implant would prove to cost more than $10-million.
“Ideal Implant Incorporated is now majority owned by plastic surgeons, making it truly the ‘Plastic Surgeons’ Breast Implant Company.”
Plastic surgeon and proponent of the Ideal Implant
Hamas found his earliest investors to be other plastic surgeons, and in 2015, he told the New York Times that his company was then majority-owned by “about 120 board-certified or board-eligible plastic surgeons.”
Years later, another plastic surgeon and proponent of the company wrote, “a number of plastic surgeons ultimately chose to become stakeholders in the company, as they believed strongly in the product and its impact for their patients.
“Ideal Implant Incorporated is now majority owned by plastic surgeons, making it truly the ‘Plastic Surgeons’ Breast Implant Company.”’
The webpage that statement appeared on has been so recently deleted that it, too, still shows up in search engine indexes.
But, like much of the company’s digital footprint, the page itself is now gone.
The latest iteration of the founder’s website also included this anecdote:
“Over the years, a number of plastic surgeons chose to become stockholders in the Company because they believed in the IDEAL IMPLANT and the difference it could make for patients.”
(State business records don’t show who the corporation’s current shareholders are, and Dr. Robert Hamas did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Company that solved silent ruptures, suddenly and silently ruptures
As news of the company’s liquidation was shared among plastic surgeons mid-week, one surgeon succinctly spoke his mind:
“No surprise. Sad for all of the investors,” he wrote.
“More sad for the patients that they just told wouldn’t have a warranty on the medical devices placed inside of their bodies,” reads the single reply.
Outside of a handful of interactions, the industry as a whole has remained quiet about the ordeal.
By late Friday, June 9, just three surgeons had informed their audiences of it, according to publicly available videos.
Unknown is whether the implants were so infrequently used by patients that widespread updates aren’t in order, or if the industry’s most popular content creators were investors in the company, or are unaware of its liquidation.
(A company email, sent May 31, informed some providers of Ideal Implant Inc’s liquidation and formed the basis of the announcement that now appears on its website.)
Patient advocates said late Friday they were unaware of patients with the company’s implants being informed that their warranties will no longer be honored.
Patients, profits, are they one and the same?
Doc, I’m up thinking about this again at the earliest hours.
Hoping it’s all a misunderstanding, I write, evidence of a company that meant well, leaving subtle signs it carried on far longer than it should have in the interest of helping patients.
And not just a company, but 30 years of your life’s work.
The company that solved silent rupture has itself silently and suddenly ruptured, it said so itself.
But is the quiet disappearance and dispersal of its contents into the ether of the internet a sign of malice?
That, too, is happening, but I can’t for the life of me reconcile the heart and passion of an inventor and founder seen in hours and hours of interviews and educational content spanning years, with the aftermath of a liquidation that entailed no effort to tell its patients by proxy: Your warranties are void, your trust fund dissolved. You’re on your own now.
And journalism doesn’t permit too great a heart. It asked its questions. Unanswered, it sought its sources.
Surgical Times reached out to company founder, CEO, and Ideal Implant inventor Dr. Robert S. Hamas, attorney Rosenthal, the U.S. FDA, and several former employees of the company. Multiple emails to attorney Rosenthal and founder Hamas, sent since last Friday, also asked that the attorney’s contact information be corrected. At 5:00 am Saturday, it remains inaccurate.
Email tips@surgicaltimes.com