"The reality is sexual trafficking, which is about young women being forced into rooms to have sex however many times a day so the pimp can take all the money. I don't get it."

Dame Anita, 63, said such imagery, coupled with the multi-million-pound beauty advertising industry, made it virtually impossible for young women to grow up with high self-esteem.

She said: "There are thousands of ads mostly focused on women and young girls that say you are not attractive, you are not sexy, you are not intelligent unless you look like this... [in] kids' magazines there is a passivity and a stupidity that is seen as the great way forward.

"And then you hear the statistics that we have the most violent young women in Europe because of binge drinking. I haven't got much hope. Something's gone very wrong."

Her daughter Sam has famously struck out with her own business, the erotic emporium Coco de Mer in Covent Garden, which sells fair-trade kinky handcuffs and claims to have a "female-centric" focus which aims to celebrate sex without exploiting women.

Dame Anita, who still refers to herself as a feminist, has turned her back on anti-wrinkle creams and said getting older had only made her more radical and more focused.

"I am not as stringent as some in the feminist movement," she said. "If someone wants a facelift, so be it. If somebody wants Botox, smile on - who cares?

"But for me there are more important things to worry about. I travel too much to epicentres of despair to worry about Western thinking about what a woman should and should not do and should and should not say."

Dame Anita left her full-time role with The Body Shop in 2002 but she and her husband Gordon still own 18 per cent and remain the biggest shareholders. There are now 300 stores worldwide and the chain is worth around £500 million.

Dame Anita is a non-executive director and still travels the world looking for new products and encouraging other cosmetics companies to adopt the firm's
community trade approach.

Speaking prior to a lecture at the British Library called The Creative Entrepreneur next month, she praised The Body Shop for its improved products but admitted she was sad that it had not retained the creativity that was so central when it was smaller.

"I had a dedication to changing workplace behaviour," she said. "We had babies in the office, mothers breastfeeding, we brought daughters into board meetings to tell us what we were doing wrong.

"Now it's quite hierarchical and patriarchal. I think the sadness is that the bigger you get the less intimate you become." However, she has no regrets about the time she and Gordon devoted to the business, despite comments by Sam that she and sister Justine, who now works for the Body Shop in Amercia, hardly ever saw them.

Dame Anita has lent her support to the British Library as part of its Beautiful Minds programme celebrating creativity in the arts, sciences and business. She believes business can be ethical and supports the library's new business centre, which opens on 8 March.

The decision was warmly welcomed by anti-smoking groups who urged other companies to follow suit.

From next month BT's 100,000 employees across the world, including 20,000 outside the UK will not be allowed to smoke on company premises or in vans bearing the BT logo.

Designated smoking rooms will be closed and converted to offices, store rooms or put to other use.

The provision of external shelters for smokers will be assessed but staff will be discouraged from having a cigarette outside BT buildings.

The company's offices have been smoke free for a number of years but special smoking rooms have been provided and workers have been allowed to light up in company vehicles.

From next month smoking will be banned in BT vans and in cars being used for business purposes.

Dr Paul Litchfield, BT's chief medical officer said the ban went no further than the legislation due to take effect in Scotland and that it had seemed "a nonsense" to have one rule for employees in Dumfries and another for those in Carlisle.

"The new rules introduce what we perceive to be the best practice in terms of enabling our people to live a healthy life," said Dr Litchfield.

"A lot of our people tell us that they want to give up smoking but need a little help, and this is part of that."

Dr Litchfield added that the ban was just part of the strategy, and that employees would receive information and support when giving up.

However, he acknowledged that not all employees would want to quit.

"It's a personal decision. We're not a police state and we're not going to go round saying people shouldn't be smoking, we are just going to put the infrastructure in place," he said.

A spokesman for anti-smoking group Ash (Action on Smoking and Health) said: "This is a welcome move by BT and we hope it sets a model for other employers to follow.

"There is no need to wait a year for the new law to come into force. Good employers should be acting now.

"Companies are realising that if their staff give up smoking they will benefit in terms of less sickness absenteeism."

BT estimates that around one third of its workers smoke.

It is already on sale in a number of French supermarkets and is being exported to Korea, Germany and Switzerland with talks in progress to launch it in America and elsewhere, though not yet Britain.

The Normandy-based maker, PPN, insisted yesterday it was not trying to convince buyers they could "drink, drink, drink" without regard to health or safety.

But its publicity material is already being interpreted in France as implying that it allows drivers to get behind the wheel without fear.

PPN's website says the product should work within 45 minutes to "prevent hangover and eliminate food and drinks quicker, especially alcohol", and to ease feelings of excess after "a lunch or party".

A footnote to the site warns that time needed for the product to take effect varies between individuals. It also warns that alcohol abuse can seriously damage health.

However, there are signs on both sides of the Channel that not everyone approves of promoting a product that encourages drinkers to feel they can quickly erase the effects of alcohol.

The vast French supermarket chain Auchan said that it had stopped selling the drink after a trial period at a store in northern France.

In Britain, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) said it had severe concerns about any product that led people to think they could drink and drive, whether or not it was marketed as such.

Sophie Morgaut, from the agency handling PNN's publicity, said: "We are not encouraging people to drink more, or to believe they can use Security Feel Better to drink and then drive.

"PPN is a very responsible company. Alcohol is widely available and this is a serious product which helps eliminate it more quickly."

In one test carried out during PPN's research, she said, a man who drank a whisky followed by a whole bottle of wine and a liqueur gave a reading of 187mg before taking Security Feel Better, but 80mg only 40 minutes later.

A court has ruled that Security Feel Better can be sold legally in France, provided its advertisements do not refer to blood-alcohol levels or the product's effect on them.

Michaela Dorfmeister, who won the women's super-G, and men's giant slalom winner Benjamin Raich put a smile back on Austrian faces with the Games entering its final week, while a team win in the ski jumping gave them a further boost.

Yet the biathlon and cross-country skiing coach, whose presence in Italy had put the Austrians in such unwanted limelight when their bases were raided by police looking for drugs over the weekend, still haunted the team even though he had returned home.

Walter Mayer's admission to an Austrian psychiatric hospital was the latest almost surreal twist to a drama which has featured a night-time drugs raid by police, a car crash, an arrest and two Austrian athletes disappearing into the night.

"Walter Mayer is in the psychiatric hospital, unfortunately. He's in custody to protect himself because apparently he's said he wanted to commit suicide or something like that. I couldn't talk to him myself," Austrian Ski Federation president Peter Schroecksnadel told state radio ORF.

Mayer is banned from the Games over his involvement in a blood doping scandal at the Salt Lake City Games in 2002. He was not found during the raid.

On Sunday he crashed into an Austrian police roadblock after refusing a breath test for alcohol. He has been charged with civil disorder, an Austrian prosecutor said, and was sacked by the Austrian ski federation.

An Italian prosecutor said police had found drugs, syringes and blood transfusion equipment during Saturday night's raid on Austrian athletes.

More than 100 syringes, 30 packs of drugs as well as devices for transfusions and testing had been seized in the raid on the biathlon and cross-country teams, the official said.

The Austrian team said later that all the drugs and medical equipment collected was legitimate.

The International Olympic Committee are still examining the urine samples they took from 15 Austrian athletes the same night, IOC President Jacques Rogge told Austrian television. [...]