The photo policy, or why every cover is the real thing

The softening is not styling. Each of these women has a second life that has nothing to do with W1 on a Friday: a career she has built, a qualification she is still studying for, a family, a circle of friends, a landlord, a school gate. She is on these pages on one condition, which is that none of that can be traced back to her, and we have never treated that condition as negotiable. A magazine can sell a face. We are not selling hers.

So what the blur removes is identity, and only identity. Everything a photograph is actually for stays exactly as shot: her height, her figure, her hair and colour, her posture, the way she wears a dress. That is why the checking below is done so carefully, and why the face you meet at the door is the one thing the pictures could not show you.

Glamour and lifestyle photography, shot in evening dresses, hotel interiors and the streets around W1. There is no nudity and no explicit pose anywhere.

The order never changes. First comes a face-to-face meeting, where we see her ID and take the details her profile will carry, down to her height. Then the shoot. Then a second look that compares every frame with the woman herself, face, hair, colouring and figure, before a single picture goes live. That is why the facts and the photographs agree.

Retouching is kept to a light hand: brightness, colour, framing, the odd flyaway, plus the softening at the face. Nothing that changes her shape, her height, her skin or the colour of her hair, and nothing that turns her into someone else. A frame that would need more than that is reshot, not rescued.

A new shade, a shorter cut, a different look for the season: any change sends her set back for review, and no set goes longer than half a year without a second look whatever happens. Pictures that stop matching are replaced, however flattering they were.

Every image belongs on this site and stops there. Saving them, reposting them, building a collection of them, lifting a softened face out of a frame, or running one through a reverse image search or a face-matching service are all forbidden, and Bella acts on any of it she hears about. None of these is a grey area: each one is an attempt to take from a woman the only thing she asked us to protect.

In the room the rule is the same. Asking for her real name, working out where else she can be found, or pointing a camera or a recorder at her ends the evening on the spot under the conduct clause in the terms, fee kept, nothing to argue about.

Should the woman who arrives not be recognisably the woman on her cover, you may decline the evening on the spot and owe nothing for it, whatever its length on the price list. Tell Bella straight away: her profile is taken offline at once and stays offline until a fresh, checked set replaces it.

Stock libraries, borrowed shots, a friend standing in, a face built or reshaped by AI: none of it appears here. Nothing is published without her agreement, and any woman can have a single frame, or her entire profile, taken down on request.