The airbrush diet!

The war of words between Rod Stewart's girlfriend Penny Lancaster and estranged wife Rachel Hunter exploded again last night.

Just a day after Rachel publicly crowed about taking Penny's modelling job with the lingerie firm Ultimo, Stewart's clearly wounded girlfriend decided to hit back.

After viewing this photograph from an Ultimo photo-shoot where Miss Hunter, 35, donned the same swimsuit Miss Lancaster once modelled, the latter took a swipe at her rival. In a bitchy onslaught, Miss Lancaster, 32, accused the mother of two of Stewart's children of undergoing a breast enlargement operation. Through her agent Nicholas Young, Miss Lancaster said: 'Looking at the picture in the papers it seems pretty obvious to me that it's the case (that she had undergone surgery).'

However, a furious Miss Hunter ordered her manager, Clare Powell, to hit back. She said: 'She definitely has not and I would be absolutely livid if someone said she had.' Yesterday, observers were more interested in what, if anything, had been done to the picture itself.

Marcelle d'Argy Smith, former editor of Cosmopolitan, said of Miss Hunter: 'She is transformed. Rachel Hunter looks simply sensational. Can this woman be made of flesh and blood? Well, no. This is a commercial, remember. 'You're not looking at a real woman here. You're looking at a heavily touched up, distorted, airbrushed image.'

So is this true? Chris Bickmore, of the London Creative Agency, Tapestry MM, has applied his technical expertise to the minor imperfections in the images of numerous celebrities. The Mail asked him to give his view here of what might have been done to Rachel Hunter. See our Look here too link!