Face recognition systems has engrossed much attention and has been applied in various domains, primarily for surveillance, security, access control and law enforcement. In recent years much advancement have been made in face recognition techniques to cater to the challenges such as pose, expression, illumination, aging and disguise. However, due to advances in technology, there are new emerging challenges for which the performance of face recognition systems degrades and plastic/cosmetic surgery is one of them. In this paper we comment on the effect of plastic surgery on face recognition algorithms and various social, ethical and engineering challenges associated with it. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.