Dr Jesper Sørensen; the knife man cometh

Chelsea gazillionaires, ageing stars, the jet set of the Upper East Side, even – it's rumoured – several cardinals and perhaps a Pope... They've all had their features rearranged by the scalpel of the Danish Dr Invisible who claims to rejuvenate faces without leaving a visible scar. It's no ordinary scalpel that Dr Jesper Sørensen wields. He's such a perfectionist that he has even designed his own tools. In this, he is eerily reminiscent of the Jeremy Irons characters in the film

'There will always be scars,' says Dr Sørensen who, unmarried and without children, lives in an eligible bachelor's flat overlooking the dome of St Paul's Cathedral. 'Scarification is the body's natural process of healing. But you make them delicate and inconspicuous. I hide the scars of a facelift up inside the hair or inside the ear, or in the natural lines in the face, in the folds and creases. I hope nobody can see my work.'

For the past 18 months, in his discreet surgery in a Victorian stucco house off the Cromwell Road, Dr S has been 'revolumising' the faces of the great and the good who fear they have lost the dewy, full-cheeked glow of youth. As we get older, we get fatter in some places – our bellies in particular – but we also lose fat from the face, producing the haggard look of old age. Dr Sørensen reverses the process, returning fat to the face, harvested from, where else? The belly.

'You have some fat atrophy in your cheek area,' Dr Sørensen tells me gently in his Danish-accented voice. I'd always thought that, at 39, my face was in reasonable nick. Now all I see in the mirror are two deep dark hollows beneath my cheekbones.

'Surgeons used to work in two dimensions, pulling back and producing that tight look. It's not necessarily youthful, just tight,' he says. 'I work in three dimensions, but I don't do inject-ables, like Botox. You will remove some lax skin [usually just in front of the ears], but you restore volume in that third dimension, by repositioning deeper layers, and correcting gravitational descent, bulging eyelids, wrinkles and slack necks. The other thing is not to do one procedure to extremes; then you'll get more obvious changes. You need to combine several procedures, but do each of them less, to give even, natural rejuvenation.'

Of course, revolumising can go wrong, too, resulting in the notorious 'pillow face', a look that recently appears to be sported by Cameron Diaz, Nicole Kidman, Madonna and others. According to Dr S, this epidemic of celebrity mumps comes because they want results too fast: 'In order to achieve the best possible results, and to avoid overcompensating and creating a pillow-face look, the surgeon has to estimate conservatively in the first instance and carry out a top-up procedure later. I believe in a moderate approach with fat transfers. I'm Scandinavian and so is my work. Less is more, is the idea: simplicity, being natural and healthy. It should never be overdone. We restore and enhance, but we don't really change people. My finest job is actually when my work is not recognised. My women patients are complimented on their hairstyles, but not their faces. That's ideal; they have achieved their goal with nobody knowing. Professional guys – and men still only make up around ten per cent of my clients – particularly don't want to be noticed. So they'll have the work done, eyelid work and breast reduction are particularly popular, and they'll say to their colleagues that they've been away on holiday, rather than admitting to surgery.'

Facelifts (from £10,000 with an initial £200 consulting fee) and eyelid rejuvenation (upper eyelids from £4,500; lower eyelids from £5,000) are Dr Sørensen's most popular procedures. Next come breast enhancement and lifting. Dr S is keen on anatomical breast implants – breast-shaped packs of silicone – than more artificial-looking, rounded implants. The premium you pay for his work(both treatments start at £6,000) is reflected in the more subtle results, combined with those near-invisible scars. 'The anatomical implants are more natural, but still only 16 per cent of British patients go for them,' he says. 'In America, they go for larger, round implants. They like the implants smaller in the UK, a little smaller still in Scandinavia, and even finer and more delicate in France.'

Dr Sørensen uses his tools not just for plastic surgery but also for re-constructive work, in particular for facial palsy (around £15,000 to £25,000) and scarring (this varies widely in price, on a case-to-case basis). 'London and New York are the plastic surgery capitals of the world,' he says. 'Plastic surgery actually originated in the United Kingdom between the wars.'

Now, about 35 per cent of Sørensen's patients fly in from abroad (including from Chicago and New York). The bulk of the remainder are Londoners, but patients come from Ireland and Scotland (even the Hebrides) to see him. 'There was a downturn in the recession,' he says. 'Plastic surgery is a huge luxury. But there is optimism here now, and it is coming back. The most popular procedures have remained the same – facial and breast surgery,' says Dr Sørensen. 'We all react quickest to facial imperfections. You can hide other things. I'd imagine it was the same 200 years ago; people were concerned with their faces and, with women, their breasts.'

As for his own face, Dr Sørensen hasn't had any work done. 'I can't work on myself,' he says, the skin round his icy blue eyes sparkling as he smiles. He's not entirely free from vanity, though, and always wears Brioni suits. At 46, he looks his age, with clear skin, but for some minor natural blemishes in colour, and hair that's flecked with grey.

The only child of a well-off Danish carpet-factory owner, Dr Sørensen has built up his specialised training for 20 years, ever since he did a one-month plastic surgery course at medical school, and found he had the combination of a talent for using his hands and for observing. He has studied at the Cochin Institute in Paris and won an 'aesthetic fellowship' in Rome. His year in Rome at a Vatican-owned clinic is veiled in secrecy for legal reasons. This fact does nothing to dissipate rumours that he worked for a plastic surgery team in Vatican City, keeping various leaders of the Catholic church looking ever more youthful, but always in a subtle way.

What drives him is a curiosity about the human face. Every year he treks through the Himalayas to take pictures of nomadic tribesmen, lugging an old large-format camera across rivers and up mountains. 'Yes, I'm very interested in the face,' he says. 'But it is not my job to define the ideal face. It's my job to listen to the patient; I don't try to make them look like someone else. I often say, you really don't need any work at all. I don't say that you will look younger by a certain number of years; it's more fair to say that I can make people look good for their age.'