10 Amber is seven years old and loves Miley Cyrus. She sleeps with a poster of the actress above her bed and stores all her most treasured possessions in a glittery purple box with the image of Hannah Montana. She also likes watching music videos on YouTube and making up dances to accompany the songs of JLS, her favourite boy band. On the whole, Amber is a confident little girl with her enthusiasms and interests. But it is hard not to notice as she talks that her eyelids are powdered with gold eyeshadow. Her hair has been styled with two sparkly hairclips and she is wearing a pale pink dress studded with fabric flowers. Later, she will show me a certificate she was given for taking part in the Mini Miss UK competition a while ago. Because as well as being a normal seven-year-old, Amber is also an aspiring child beauty queen. Did she enjoy entering the beauty pageant? Amber thinks for a second and then nods her head. Will she be entering any more? “Yes.” She pauses with a touch of uncertainty. “If Mummy told me to.” The child beauty pageant circuit in the UK has seen a recent explosion in popularity. Five years ago, there were no mini beauty pageants in Britain. Today, more than 20 are held each year with thousands of girls (and sometimes even boys) taking part. Many of the contestants are as young as five and one pageant excludes anyone over the age of 12. A typical beauty pageant will consist of several rounds, often including an “evening wear” section, where children parade down a catwalk wrapped in taffeta and decorated with Swarovski crystals, and a talent round, in which contestants will display a particular gift, such as singing, dancing or baton-twirling. For a successful child beauty queen the rewards can be lucrative – the winner of Junior Miss British Isles can expect to pocket £2,500 – but it takes a lot of work. Sasha Bennington, 13, one of the most successful child beauty queens on the UK circuit, undergoes a demanding beauty routine to keep up appearances and insists on a spray tan every week, a new set of acrylic nails each month and regular bleaching of her white-blonde hair. Unsurprisingly, Bennington’s idol is Katie Price. To their critics, such beauty pageants are exploitative and force children to adopt semi-sexualised adult behaviour that they do not fully understand and enforce the message that physical appearance is all-important. […] Yet many in the pageant industry insist it is a harmless pastime that gives young girls confidence and self-esteem. Entering a pageant is thus a time-consuming and costly process, involving entrance fees of up to £200. On top of that, parents can expect to pay several hundred pounds for suitably eye-catching outfits – from tailor-made mini ball gowns laced with glittery stones to the flamenco-style red-and-white polka-dot dress that Amber wore to compete in Mini Miss UK. It is clear that Amber is a bright and charismatic girl, but does entering such a young child into a pageant encourage her to grow up too quickly? “I don’t foresee any problem as to what I’ve done with my daughter personally,” says Sally, Amber’s mother. “I don’t allow Amber to wear mascara. If it’s a special event, I do her eyes and give her a little bit of clear lip-gloss, but she’s beautiful as she is. She’s a child and I believe that her beauty comes from within.” In many ways, the rise in child beauty pageants can be linked to an increasingly noticeable cultural trend to treat young children as mini adults. Supermarkets have been criticised in the past for selling padded bras Living dolls Reading: Inside the world of child beauty pageants Read the text about child beauty pageants, then choose the correct answer (A, B, C or D) for questions 1–5. Put a cross ( ✘) in the correct box. The first one (0) has been done for you. They parade in miniature ball gowns, wear false eyelashes and can be as young as five. We venture into the world of mini beauty contests or pageants to meet the young princesses and their pushy parents. 1 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85 90 128 Beauty and fashion trends Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv
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