Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but as Sophia Loren put it the other day, it's really fifty per cent what you've got and fifty per cent what people think you've got.

She should know. She has had a fifty year career persuading us all how beautiful she is. Of course, being a gentleman, I would not dream of applying the percentages in her case.

My real concerns though, are not about Ms Loren but about the infinitely more delectable and desirable Jamie Lee Curtis Since her 1985 film 'Perfect' in which she played a superfit gym instructor, dressed in a wonderful selection of beguiling leotards, I have been devoted to her.

Her figure was not just sensational but sensationally on display - no imagination needed. So if, as I have remarked on a previous occasion in this column, the most important weapon in a woman's sexual armoury is a man's imagination, then Jamie was way ahead of the game.

And it explains why I, cool, sophisticated and utterly unimpressed by showbiz hype, was enraptured.

So pictures of her, published recently in an American women's magazine called appropriately, 'More', showing her with chubby thighs, chubby bum, chubby hips - you get the idea - left me devastated.

Just because she is now 43, it is absolutely no excuse for allowing the gentle thickening of the figure that most other women in the world are subject to. Not the super-honed, super-toned, super-tanned, super-smooth Jamie of my dreams. How could she do it to me?

In the magazine article, she confessed to having had Botox injections, liposuction, a variety of nips and tucks and goodness knows what else. Well that is fine. When you are as cool, sophisticated and unimpressionable (as I mentioned before) as I am, you understand this is what Hollywood actresses do. They do not get to be as dreamily delicious as they are, on nature's whim.

And it is not just Hollywood actresses. In Britain alone, more than 24,000 people a year are having cosmetic surgery - and they are not all would-be screen stars. The world-wide market is said to be worth £200 million, growing at the rate of 10% a year.

But back to my delicious Jamie. The dear girl said she did not want unsuspecting 40 year old women of the world to be deceived by what she considered to be her 'fraud'.

She warned that no cosmetic surgery can be regarded as permanent. If you take fat from one area of your body, it returns somewhere else. An awful lot of middle-aged women will have very smug smirks on their chubby faces.

As for me and my grand passion, it seems I am just another of the world's poor, deluded males - in spite of my cool sophistication. And in reality, 'Perfect' was a stinker of a film that bombed at the box office!