Doc Hollywood.(plastic surgeon Raj Kanodia aides Hollywood celebrities)

Byline: Joan Kron

What's it like to see your work onscreen but never be able to take credit for it? Ask plastic surgeon Raj Kanodia, Hollywood's best-kept secret.

Raj Kanodia is down on one knee in his Beverly Hills operating room, eye level with the table, studying the new profile he has just fashioned for a young woman. He goes up and down on his knee several times, filing and making the tiniest adjustments to the nose with a fine rasp each time he rises. Then he puts away his tools. "No one will know she ever had it done. The character is still there," he says with pride.

Kanodia is the sculptor of the moment in Hollywoodespecially with celebrities. The 60-year-old ear, nose, and throat doctor takes a minimal approach to cosmetic surgery, which has earned him respect and admiration from patients who want their facial manipulations to go undetected. "I just finesse," he says. "I can't stand a turned-up nose."

When word leaked that Kanodia had straightened Simpson's nose, the surgeon was shocked.

And the noses he has allegedly shaped belong to some of the biggest stars today. He is the man who, by all reports, streamlined Ashlee Simpson's nose in April 2006. Cameron Diaz has never stated point-blank that Kanodia changed the shape of her nose, but she has admitted that her nose was broken four times (once while surfing in Hawaii with Justin Timberlake) and that Kanodia changed her life. Now "it's the nose it always wanted to be," she said in US Weekly. And when High School Musical star Ashley Tisdale admitted to her own nose surgery, Kanodia was inundated with media phone calls asking him for comment, which he refused.

During his 27 years in practice, Kanodia has treated his share of famous faces and has started to become well-known himself. When women see him in restaurants, they swivel around, lean over booth walls, or rush over to greet him. His popularity only grew after he appeared on the TV series Dr. 90210. (In one episode, he removed three moles from Cindy Crawford's body.) Last summer, when Kanodia was shopping for a tie in Paris, the saleswoman asked, "Aren't you that doctor on TV?"