the sebagh secret; The European youth guru famous for "surgery with a syringe" brings his magic to the U.S. with an innovative new skin-care line.

Byline: Sarah Harris

What is it with this place?" asks the taxi driver en route to 25 Wimpole Street in London. "I drop off and pick up here all the time. They tell me there's a miracle doctor inside."

Cosmetic surgeon Jean-Louis Sebagh, M.D., can certainly work wonders. Why else would women who look like they've got plenty better to do be sitting in his reception room at 7:00 p.m. and, furthermore, look pretty happy to be there? They might check their Cartier watches now and again, but they're leafing through magazines and sipping Starbucks like it's 11:00 a.m., all to the tune of ringing telephones signaling a second tsunami of hopeful patients (the waiting list currently hovers at about five months).

Before long, the 51-year-old Algerian-born Frenchman who pioneered Botox in the U.K. and claims to do "surgery with a syringe" emerges. He ushers me past closed-door V.I.P. waiting rooms-for clients who can't afford to be spotted-and into his office, where he jumps up on the operating bed like a sprightly teenager, chirpy, baby-faced, with graying curly hair and a roguish giggle. It's clear why his patients like him so much-plus he can take ten years off their faces in ten minutes.

Far from just another wrinkle-eraser, Sebagh is a doctor famed for his candor when it comes to his philosophies on beauty and aging. "The obsession of perfection is sick; people go too far with this, non?" he declares in a heavy French accent (it soon becomes apparent that all sentences end in "non?"), accompanied by a cute shrug and the arched eyebrow the French do so well. "People say to me, 'My nose is not perfect,' but it's so irrelevant. When I read these horrible books on plastic surgery they say, 'The angle between the nose and the forehead has to be 32 degrees. The distance between the lash line and cheekbone has to be eighteen millimeters.' They say this is perfect beauty. This is horrible! ...