Did Kate Middleton use 2016 Vogue cover to create Mother's Day photo?

Royal watchers are convinced that Kate Middleton’s face has been photoshopped from her Vogue cover from 2016 into her new Mother’s Day photo.

Theories have been rife regarding the Princess of Wales’ photo with her kids which was posted on the Waleses’ official social media account to mark the UK Mothering Sunday.

Major media agencies, including AP and Rueters retracted the image from their news coverage only hours after publishing over suspicion of heavy editing on the photo, which Kate later admitted to via a candid tweet.

Fueling the conspiracy theories, the Daily Mirror journalist Ruby Naldrett took to X, formerly Twitter, to offer her two cents on the scandal.

"My analysis of the Kate Middleton photo saga is that they took her face from the Vogue cover she did years ago and edited it in," she wrote alongside the photos for comparison.

Visual media and comms expert TJ Thomson spoke to Yahoo Lifestyle about the possibility of the aforementioned theory being true.

He said, "I overlaid the Vogue cover on top of the Instagram image and think there are some similarities, but it's not, in my estimation, an exact match. Perhaps something like an 80-90 per cent overlap?"

He explained: "It has been picked up quite easily, quite quickly, within 12 hours or so, and it is really easy in Photoshop to just kind of face swap someone else's head onto someone else's body.

"It's probably more or less real, there could be a little bit of airbrushing, a little bit of smoothing, teeth whitening — that kind of thing, I think the basic components probably are accurate. But it's just a matter of if they are all accurate at the same point in time, at that same location that the photo is claiming it is,” Thomson added.