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Bob Corse never liked his nose. Or his thin lips. Or his weak chin. So he had them "done". Then age and gravity got a hold of his hooded eyes, his sagging chin and turkey neck - so he had them done too.

Now, 15 years after first going under the cosmetic surgeon's knife, Bob is 53 and moving on to other parts of his body.

The brown age spots on his hands were recently burnt off. The next target is what Bob, who is American, calls his "butt".

"It's kinda flat, you know," he grins. "It's not as resilient as it was 30 years ago."

So far, his total bill for cosmetic changes has been around £8,000, approximately the cost of an average new family car. And as Bob has two of those already, he considers his investment in a new face to be relatively inexpensive.

The results of his latest spending can be seen at the top of the column of before and after shots on the right. On the left is the old Bob, while on the right the eyes are no longer droopy, the neck is firm and youthful and the chin has the firm jut of a man half his age.

But what prompts a middle-aged man to go to such lengths of vanity?

"I'm not a cosmetic surgery junkie," says Bob. "The nose looked so good, I wanted everything around it to look good."

Handsome

That was how his love affair with the surgeon's knife began - with a large, hooked nose which preceded Bob into the consulting rooms of Philadelphia's Dr Nose, Julius Newman.

"He looked like he was in showbusiness but he was very direct. He said 'I'm going to make you handsome', which is exactly what I wanted to hear," says Bob.

"My new nose increased my confidence, improved my sex life and boosted my career as an advertising voice-over, even though I'm heard but not seen. So I looked at myself and my other features and wondered what else I could do to complete the package."

The nose job was swifly followed by cheek and chin implants, liposuction on face and neck, a chemical peel on his complexion, lifted eyes and puffed-up lips.

"Now if you saw me, you would probably guess me to be around 40. And I feel younger than that," says Bob. "I'm very happy with the way I look."

With a perter backside and a facelift in the offing, Bob is facing the future with vigour.

"I don't mind getting old," he says. " I just don't want to look old."

Promotion

He is not alone, of course. More than 700,000 American men have had plastic surgery since 1980 and now British men have begun to realise that a nip and a tuck here and there can make all the different in a society dominated by the cult of youth.

One plastic surgeon reports that most of his male patients have gone through some kind of change of life - a divorce, possibly a death in the family, or maybe they have been passed over for promotion. Surgery gives them the courage to face the future with renewed confidence.

Thanks to remarkable advances in cosmetic surgery there are few parts of a man's face or body that cannot change - forehead lifts, chin jobs, tummy tucks, nose jobs, and even silicone implants in the chest to give an instant muscle-man look to the pectorals. In Britain, one in four requests for cosmetic surgery now come from men.

In California, men make up 40 per cent of patients, while on the East Coast 25 per cent are men.

The most popular operations are nose jobs, eyelid tucks, liposuction (vacuum fat removal) and facelifts.

In fact there are hundreds of men on both sides of the Atlantic who have to remember to shave behind their ears in the morning, due to the fact that skin was drawn back when they had their facelift. But these men have been given a lead by the stars. Frank Sinatra's hair transplant 20 years ago showed balding men that it was all right to do something about hair loss. Since then, Nicholas Cage has had a nose job, Kenny Rogers had liposuction (11lbs worth) and Donald Trump toyed with the idea of a buttock "lift".

Others have quietly booked themselves in to have liposuction requests on their "love handles".

As a man gets older the tip of his nose tends to get more bulbous, his jaw turns into jowls, cheeks can sink, his midriff becomes more hefty, he can get bags under his eyes and his chin sags. But all these problems can be rectified.

Dimpled

A chemical peel can erase early signs of ageing, including liver spots and dry patches. Even a Kirk Douglas-style dimpled chin can be created with one little stitch.

One, more intimate, part of a man's body has proved rather difficult to redesign, however.

"We have had seminars on the subject, but alas it doesn't work the same way as a breast," says consultant Tony Erian.

"If you want to improve its size you have to ask Houdini, Paul Daniels or God. In certain cases we can put in an implant but that is really not for cosmetic reasons, if you follow my meaning."