My small son has become obsessed with dinosaurs. He is especially fond of his model triceratops, which sleeps next to him on his pillow, pointy horns and all. Velociraptors, on the other hand, he’s not so keen on. He worries about them a lot, since apparently they’re quite “bitey”; that, and the fact that, in his world, dinosaurs are as real as our family mutt, Mars.

The reason for this is simple: CGI. Thanks to the ITV series Prehistoric Park in which live dinosaurs are lured through a time portal into the present day, he thinks that somewhere there’s a fortified zoo where giant lizards are fed and watered by a team of time-travelling scientists. Every time I try to explain about the meteor and the big skeleton in the Natural History Museum, he just nods sagely and says, “Yes, Mummy, but that’s not in real true life.”

His sense of what is real and what is just clever special effects is distinctly blurred. On Saturday, desperate to escape the never-ending drizzle, I took him and his sister to see G-Force (a film about rodent spies) in 3-D. The movie itself was pretty dire; but the 3-D effects were truly remarkable. My daughter kept reaching out towards the screen, desperate to catch hold of the animals that appeared to be dangling in mid-air. To an adult, such trickery is an amusing illusion; to a child, however, it’s a kind of new reality. These are indeed uncharted waters.

In truth, believing in zoos full of dinosaurs and talking guinea pigs is pretty harmless stuff. But there is a more sinister side to these altered realities, one that the Liberal Democrat Jo Swinson yesterday identified. She has suggested that magazines and advertisers should come clean, in print, about images that have been digitally enhanced. “Airbrushing means that adverts contain completely unattainable images that no one can live up to in real life,” Swinson, the MP for East Dunbartonshire, said. “No one really has perfect skin, perfect hair and a perfect figure — but women and young girls increasingly feel that nothing less than thin and perfect will do.”

Swinson is bang on the money. If my son didn’t have me for a mother, he might well grow up believing that all middle-aged women look as hot as Demi Moore. Luckily, my weakness for Mini Magnums will save him from any such illusions. For my daughter, however, already at the age of 6 showing signs of peer pressure in the appearance stakes, a more failsafe solution is necessary. Because the truth is that striving to look as good as, for example, Madonna in the current Louis Vuitton campaign is about as realistic as basing future income on the generosity of the tooth fairy.

As an adult, I am perfectly at liberty to engage (or not) in the fantasy of fashion. But the young are neither so self-assured nor so cynical. They will believe what they see in the pages of glossy magazines, just as my son believes there might be ’raptors at the bottom of our garden. They will look at what they see on the page, and they will look at what they see in the mirror and, unless they happen to be possessed of wildly serendipitous genes and/or an infallible ego, they will inevitably find themselves lacking. Welcome to a lifetime of self-loathing.

Just as CGI is now a staple of all Hollywood films, retouching is endemic in the fashion and beauty universe. Indeed, the process of digital enhancement has even spawned its own sub-industry, with top models not only dictating which photographers they will work with, but also which retouchers they will let loose on their frames. It is largely thanks to computer artistry that Kate Moss, her extraordinary beauty somewhat worn by the natural process of ageing and her lifestyle, is still able to command top whack.

Of course retouching has been around since long before the invention of Photoshop: Cecil Beaton famously used to doctor his society portraits, and any search of a newspaper library will still reveal old black and white pictures, judiciously tweaked by hand and retouching fluid. Never before, however, have the boundaries between fantasy and reality been so successfully blurred, the deceit so complete. There is nothing wrong with a bit of gentle flattery; but misrepresenting the way a woman looks so completely is just plain dishonest.

It is also irresponsible. That someone who has led a life as hedonistic as Kate Moss should escape having a Dorian Gray-style portrait lurking somewhere in her portfolio sends only the following message to young girls: don’t worry too much about taking care of yourselves; eat, drink and be merry — for tomorrow we retouch. Failing that, you can just get some nice gentleman with a scalpel to put you back together again.

Plastic surgery, once a serious branch of medicine, is now the ultimate expression of the retoucher’s art. For every necessary procedure, there are countless spurious ones, operations that don’t so much correct a genuine disfigurement as enhance the patient’s vanity. Surgically, the world is dividing into the haves and the have-nots — and it’s the haves who are, perversely, making the rest of us feel increasingly freakish, raising the bar of what’s aesthetically acceptable to an unrealistically high level.

All of which serves only to muddy the waters of female self-esteem. There are countless examples of famous women who have bypassed the need for genuine talent by enhancing themselves not just on the page but also in the flesh. How admirable, really, is their success? What, exactly, is there to applaud in a woman who has her breasts enlarged by artificial means? Or the celebrity who spends thousands having her fat sucked out so that she can “look 16 again”? Or the actress who looks younger at 50 than she did at 25? Yet we regularly celebrate these surgically retouched creatures as “icons”, denigrating those who dare to present a less flattering reality to the world.

I have, then, an even more radical proposal to add to Ms Swinson’s excellent idea: all actresses-cum-models-cum- whatevers should be obliged to declare their plastic surgery in a sort of annual “aesthetic audit”. This database should then be made available online (www. faceliftbook.com, perhaps?) in the interests of the sanity of all other females, and every time a star makes an appearance in a film their surgeon should be credited where appropriate. Who knows, perhaps the Academy might even like to consider an Oscar for “Best Surgical Improvement of a Leading Lady” — you know, just so that everyone’s clear about the provenance of that fabulous rear/stomach/pout. That way, as they say, the public can make an informed choice: if you want to idolise an artificially enhanced dolly-bird, good for you. If not — well, I can heartily recommend getting a life.

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