I tell her yes. Even though it will probably be tomorrow now. I’m the only retoucher Rebecca uses, so she has no choice but to wait. Rebecca is a photographer who is in high demand. I started working for her when she shot brochures for hotels around ten years ago. The level of hotel was very high-end – five-star resorts all across the world. I enjoyed it, making the sky bluer and the grass greener. She started getting work for magazines and kept throwing the work in my direction. A lot of food at first, some landscapes, but the jobs soon turned into people. I was excellent at retouching people because I had years of practice of making photographs of myself look nicer. I have a secret file on my computer – I named it ‘MENSTRUAL DIARY’ in case I die and someone gets into my computer and is tempted to look at them. The file is full of pictures of me that people took before I had the self-assurance to say no. They are hard to come by, but of course they exist. At university people used disposable cameras; I was lucky to be a student before the advent of camera phones and social media. I might not have survived that. I have a little shoe box – something I also hide – full of photographs. I scanned them all into my computer and worked them up into images I wouldn’t mind the world seeing. Of course I’d never show them to anyone, I couldn’t live that lie. Ironically, this doctoring is now exactly what I do for models and celebrities, who don’t have the same issue with dishonesty.

Rebecca now shoots for Vogue, Elle, Cosmo and any other publications that print photos of beautiful women who need to look even more beautiful. It’s a lot of work that’s kept coming my way. It’s hard to turn that down when you’re a single mother and need to pay for your three-bedroom Victorian terrace in Kentish Town, a love of antique furniture and a penchant for expensive handbags.

My job and my moral compass battle with each other every day. I know how much a negative body image can ruin a woman’s life, and here I am perpetuating the problem and giving that complex to millions of other women every single day. I get away with it because my name never appears anywhere. I am the silent partner in crime. The hidden face behind other people’s fake perception of beauty. I am the source of the problem.