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“The photographer showed her the photos before they went to the magazine,” said Robert Garlock of PMK. “She did not see what the magazine did to alter them.” Is she annoyed at the changes? “She’s resigned to it, she knows it happens.”

Airbrushing out spots, faults or entire people has been commonplace for years, but in the digital age much more is possible. When Michael Jackson was reunited on stage with the Jackson Five, the film was reputedly doctored to make him appear blacker. In a forthcoming film called Polar Express, the director Robert Zemeckis uses “face mapping” technology to turn Tom Hanks back into a teenager.

So tweaking a few magazine stills is child’s play. Anyone can be made to look thinner, fitter or more attractive. Does it matter? Is it a betrayal of readers seeking the beauty of truth or the truth about beauty? “I don’t think we’re hoodwinking the public,” claimed Jones. “These days there are two types of magazine pictures — paparazzi shots or heavily styled glossy pictures that have everything done to them to make someone as beautiful and sexy as possible.” And that now includes total body replacement.

“I WAS half naked, well pretty naked really,” said Nicola Formby, who was photographed for GQ a year ago. “Being naked you have just got to trust the photographer to make you look perfect. I didn’t realise how perfect he was going to make it.”

In the photographs, Formby ended up with “lovely new bosoms”, which she dubs “night-time bosoms”, that were considerably fuller than her “daytime bosoms”.

Did she mind? Not a bit. “I think we would all rather see people with lovely smooth cellulite-free bodies,” she said.

As Formby points out, models have long been irradiated with lights, sculpted with make-up and squeezed into any other available artifice to improve their looks. Digital manipulation is just the latest wizardry.

But as boundaries are pushed ever further, doubts arise. Yasmin Mills, a former model also photographed for GQ, believes manipulating images is “fine” so long as the end result bears a reasonable likeness to the model.

“A lot of models today would have a shorter career if it wasn’t for digitally enhanced photographs,” she said. “It’s the answer to all evils. But there is a line between seeming realistic and ridiculous distortion.

“I’d be miffed if I were Kate Winslet because I don’t think anyone is walking around thinking that is her body.”

Others are more critical, believing that the beauty now paraded by magazines deludes, then disillusions, dreamy readers.

“The truth is nobody has any idea what anybody really looks like,” said Marcelle D’Argy Smith, who was editor of Cosmopolitan before digital trickery became routine. It matters, she said, because “ordinary people look at themselves in the mirror every morning and think, my God, I’m hideous, because I walk around thinking there are these people (in magazine photographs) who are completely gorgeous. We are living in a lunatic world”.

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