Nefertiti got extreme makeover: researchers

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German researchers said Tuesday they have uncovered a second, hidden face within one of ancient Egypt's most treasured artefacts, the bust of legendary beauty Queen Nefertiti.

The delicately sculpted face on the interior, revealed when the bust underwent a computed tomography (CT) scan, indicates that Nefertiti may not have been the flawless beauty depicted on the bust's exterior.

Compared to the outer stucco face, the hidden limestone visage had less depth in the corners of the eyelids, laugh lines around the corners of the mouth and cheeks, less prominently regal cheekbones and a tiny bump on the ridge of the nose.

"We acquired a lot of information on how the bust was manufactured more than 3,300 years ago by the royal sculptor," said the chief author of the study published Tuesday in the April issue of Radiology, Alexander Huppertz.

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The findings, published on Tuesday in the monthly journal Radiology, are the first to show that the stone core of the statue is a highly detailed sculpture of the queen, Huppertz said.

"Until we did this scan, how deep the stucco was and whether a second face was underneath it was unknown," he said.

"The hypothesis was that the stone underneath was just a support."

The differences between the faces, though slight - creases at the corners of the mouth, a bump on the nose of the stone version - suggest to Huppertz that someone expressly ordered the adjustments between stone and stucco when royal sculptors immortalised the wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten 3,300 years ago.

"Changes were made, but some of them are positive, others are negative," Huppertz said.

John H Taylor, a curator for Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum in London, said the scan raises interesting questions about why the features were adjusted - but that answers will probably remain elusive.

"One could deduce that the final version was considered in some way more acceptable than the 'hidden' one, though caution is needed in attempting to explain the significance of these changes," Taylor wrote in an email.