From the DM,
TWIGGY is a 300 year-old Bulgarian woman, Oil of Olay admitted last night.
The cosmetics giant was forced to reveal the true identity of Britain's favourite model after hundreds of readers spotted some slight airbrushing around her eyes in a magazine advert.
But they insisted that Twiggy, whose real name is Svetlana Betsov, is a modern miracle and should not be mocked or poked at like some kind of freak.
According to the company Twiggy was born near the small town of Chavdar in 1708, the third child of farmer Yuri Betsov and his wife Albert.
As a teenager she gained employment as a housemaid with the Koralevs, one of the richest families in the Austro-Hungarian empire, eventually moving with them to Paris in 1727.
After the Koralevs were crushed by a falling piano in 1732, she was taken in by the controversial chemist Georges Olay who used her in a series of dangerous experiments involving charcoal, beetroot oil and human lard.
By 1746 Olay realised that his 38 year-old employee did not look a day over 21 and eventually introduced her to Parisian society as Mademoiselle Juliette Twigé.
When Olay died in 1762 he entrusted his son Pierre with the care and maintenance of the 53 year-old woman, leaving him detailed instructions about how to change her identity every 25 years.
Over the generations Twiggy has been reinvented as a French aristocrat, a German industrialist and a Highland warrior before taking the name Lesley Hornby in 1949 and dazzling swinging London with her waifish charm and detailed knowledge of Bulgarian dairy farming.
A company spokesman said: "This whole thing has unravelled remarkably quickly.
"Twiggy has seen things you would not believe. We all have a lot to learn from her."