After another potential arranged marriage failed to gel, Kapil Kapur started to despair that he would ever meet a soul mate.

His facial disfigurement had led to children picking on him at school and job interviews ending with a closed door.

In what he described as a Bollywood culture which often looked skin-deep, it also left him to one side in the dating game.

Now the 39-year-old is fronting a campaign for facial equality with Changing Faces, which aims to challenge people's perceptions through a series of multimedia messages and posters.

Life was not easy for Kapil when he was a child at Moor Lane School in Chessington and later at Southborough Boys, Surbiton, having to cope with surgeries on his cleft palate and hair lip.

He said: "It was hard in the early days because I had a lot of operations on my face. I was often bullied at school as well so that was quite hard to deal with."

Schoolchildren can be harsh, but when he stepped out in the world of work he encountered a different version of the same prejudice. "As a child of 15 or 16 I went for an interview at McDonalds and the guy took one look at me and said no," he said.

"They didn't give me a reason but it was obvious. It frustrated me in many ways and was quite painful."

He did not let it hold him back and he studied maths at Warwick and Oxford, ending up as an IT contractor working with the Department of Health.

Finding love was another matter. He said: "There was a stage when I was younger when I thought I might not meet anybody. I went through arranged marriages but it just didn't happen. It wasn't for me.

"It was quite obvious it was the face. The Bollywood culture is all about looks."

But when he started chatting to a woman called Kay on the internet he sensed things were different.

"I got to the stage where I trusted her and thought she was a bit different. I remember I asked her what do you focus on? Is it looks or the heart?' and she said It's the mind'.

"I told her about my cleft palate. We met up over a coffee, got talking and things progressed from there."

Kapil and wife Kay, 38, who is studying economics at Roehampton University, married and live in Bolton Close, Chessington. They now have a two-month-old son Krishan.

He said: "She has been very supportive. She does wonder sometimes why people stare in the street. It does affect her slightly but we have achieved so much in four years." A recent survey revealed that nine out of 10 people have negative attitudes towards people with disfigurements - some of whom are too scared to step of the front door.

Visit the campaign website changingfaces.org.uk for more information.