From his reply, I'm pretty sure he meant this is his first completed model, in a sense. As he said, he used references and studied the anatomy. He also mentioned this head was about 20 hours of work, which is quite a while and is obviously a ton of tweaking.

One thing that I remember I always did was look at other's wireframes, and I would have to believe he also did in order to recognize the clean lines and spent a long time to achieve it.

Just because one person might "get" it sooner than others doesn't mean he's cheating. It happens.