There's a little bit inside all of us that wants to look glamorous.

As any of my friends could testify, I actually look nothing like the pictures of me on this blog. These photos are the result of a 'Hollywood' photo session the DH and I played around with a couple of years ago. In real life I don't lie around on fox furs and pearls and I too have spots, freckles, wrinkles and all the rest of the issues that face most women.

But I'm also lucky enough to be married to Steve - who knows his way around Photoshop. 

Having been hugely impressed by his various photos of me that were pinned up around the room at our Black and White party, some of my girlfriends expressed a wish to be 'done' in the same way. So on Saturday we had a girls night in and two of them duly posed (while the rest of them stood around and made comments, naturally). 

First up was Mikki, and here she is, thoroughly glamour-pussed. I did my bit with make-up and clothes (she's wearing a full 'Marilyn' makeup and swathed in metallic organza - not that you can tell), but the DH did the rest - the cleverest thing is that he's made her hair longer.

As Mikki - mum to a 12-year-old daughter and who stomps around in DMs - would be the first to admit, she doesn't look like this every day, but this is how she'd like to look, and now she's got a fabulous photo to show her future grandchildren. 

Second to give it a try was Alex, swathed in 1930s furs and looking phenomenally elegant - a big change from her usual wellies and jeans as she pulls baby lambs out of her pet sheep. 

The rest of the girls wimped out on the night - convinced, I think, that they are beyond repair, though I suspect they may change their minds once they see the pictures. 

In real life, of course, both girls looked more drag queen than diva. The thick, matt makeup required to stand up to the photographic lights is unpleasant to wear, and the eye makeup is black and white in order to gain maximum contrast. When I did it, I was itching to get it off my face afterwards but I hear that Alex decided to keep hers overnight and went to bed in full slap, hoping some of it would still be there the next day.

In the second of this occasional series on retouching, let's take a look at Cameron Diaz.

Diaz is a remarkably beautiful woman - she was a leading model before she was a leading actress - but it's clearly still not good enough for some magazine editors. 

Above you can see some classic photoshopping - in the 'after' picture on the right, her complexion's been evened out, her eyes made super-white like an alien, lips highlighted and her whole face and hair lightened and brightened. 

Left, you can see her hips, from the same shot. Again, in the 'after' picture (on the right) the skintone has been evened out, and the shadow under the external oblique muscle has been lightened, giving her a smoother, more 'feminine' belly (the opposite would probably have been done if she'd been a man). A sliver of flesh has also been removed from the right hip. 

When even one of the most beautiful women in the world doesn't cut the mustard, what hope for the rest of us?

I have been tracking down some retouched pictures, mainly of celebs, to make us all feel better in the New Year.

It pays to remember, when you're gazing at your bloodhound face in the mirror, that the beautiful people are not only beautiful because of good bone structure or fine eyes, but because of stylists, professional makeup artists, haidressers, professional pressers, control underwear, great lighting and photography.

Above and beyond these things, however, there is the magic of post-processing in Photoshop to achieve a flawless look in photographs.

In all portrait photography, there is a necessary degree of retouching because the camera does indeed lie. Photographic lighting punches through most makeup, and tired, red eyes and spots show up more in photos than in real life. 

In this photo of Sheridan, however, you can see how the photoshopper has also removed her dark circles, lines around the mouth and slight skin creping on the neck, brightened her eyes, smoothed out her hands and given her skin and hair a smooth golden glow. 

The result is wonderfully glamourous, but we all need to remember, it's just not real - it's now a painting, not a likeness. 

No wonder women are always comparing themselves with supermodels and coming up short. Because even if we're not six foot tall and seven stone wringing wet, we too could look fabby if we had a team of photographers, stylists, make-up artists, dressers, lighting engineers, designers, jewellers and hairdressers working on us round the clock.

FYI, these three photos were taken within months of each other.

The first photo is the 'real me', if you like. Taken at the end of a long day, I'm looking pretty tired, wearing my normal makeup (I see I've eaten off most of my lipstick) and am indoors but lit by photographic lights. The normal makeup you wear every day isn't strong enough to stand up to flash photography, and that shows clearly here. Note that you can also see both my freckles and my sulky puppet mouth - that's a sign it hasn't been retouched. This pissed-off expression is my habitual one and means: "Oh, for fuck's sake get ON with it...". There are probably hundreds of pix of me looking like this.

The second photo on the other hand is the kind that makes you want to shoot yourself. Taken for 'Prima' magazine, it was meant to evoke Provence, so photographing it in Normandy on a glacially cold day in March was something of a trial (just outside the frame, there's still snow on the ground). As well as having to squint into sunlight and twist myself into a weird position on a garden bench, the magazine insisted that I smile (oh ye gods...) and wear something bright. Well, I don't wear bright things. I wear black things and brown things and blue things, so this blocky waistcoat was the closest thing I could find (and has also since been binned for its pup-tent potential - you can't see the rest of this pic, but boy scouts could camp in this thing). Generally speaking, I'd advise any woman to jettison a photo this unflattering immediately - don't keep them hanging around unless you want your grandkids to remember you as a giant rat.

The last photo ...sigh... is how I'd like to pretend I look all the time and was shot for a bit of fun one day when the DH fancied playing at Hollywood Portraits. But it's achieved only with considerable artifice (come on, you guessed, didn't you?). First come the studio lighting and props (vintage furs and lace) and second, I'm on my back, which brings out your cheekbones (a good tip, if you ever want a studio portrait taken). To tell the truth, I'm lying on the living room floor, on a photo roll and some pillows. Add to this makeup about half a yard thick to stand up to the lights, and repowdering between every shot. Then finally the image itself has been retouched, just like EVERY picture you EVER see of ANY model - note the complete lack of freckles, lines, etc, which is a dead giveaway that something's been worked on. Cindy Crawford once said that sometimes she didn't recognise herself in photos, she'd been so heavily retouched, and now I know what she means.

All of this is digression, really. What I really wanted to say was we should all stop beating ourselves up if we don't look like Lily Cole, or even women our own age like Teri Hatcher or Salma Hayek. Because beautiful though they may be, they don't look that good in real life any more than we do.

These are close-ups from two photographs of Desperate Housewives star Nicolette Sheridan. Just hazard a guess which one has been Photoshopped?

I've said it elsewhere on here, but I'll be saying again - EVERY editorial photo you ever see of a celeb and every photo you ever see of a model has had this kind of work done. I'm married to a photographer and I know - the very basics that any photographer will do to a portrait shot are:

whiten the eyes (everyone's eyes look bloodshot in pictures)

lighten, saturate and intensify the eye colour (so that they 'zing' out of the picture)

sharpen the iris (intensifies the eyes)

whiten the teeth (everyone's teeth look yellow in pictures)

remove spots and blemishes (why leave them in?)

selectively blur the skin (softens the contrast, covers lines, shadows and imperfections. Loses your freckles in the process)

lighten the skin (gives it a glow. Also, most models and actresses suffer from adult acne, partly because of their age but partly because they're constantly wearing makeup, which isn't good for their skin.)

For beauty photography, they also sculpt the face, widen the mouth, lengthen the neck, lengthen the body and airbrush the body as required.

In this photo, even though I've lost detail by zooming, you can clearly see there's been treatment to the hand to remove veins and wrinkles, stronger highlights added to the lips, lines removed around the mouth, eyes and on the neck and the image has been warmed overall to make her skin glow and her hair blonder.

This kind of tweaking of an image is nothing new - the old Hollywood photographers did fantastic tricks with their subjects, including over-exposure to burn out skin imperfections and using shift lenses to make the subject taller and slimmer.

But the problem is, I wonder if we are now so bombarded with these images of perfection that we're starting to forget what real people look like. It's not as if Nicolette Sheridan isn't beautiful to start with. But she's a beautiful woman in her 40s, not her 20s - why try to make her look 20? Why remove all signs of life and experience from her face? Hasn't she earned the right to her wrinkles?