Beauty Pageant Adds First-Ever ‘Makeup-Free’ Round After Influx of Young Entrants with Botox and Fillers

A prolific beauty pageant has gone make-up free for the first time after organisers expressed shock at the number of young women modifying their faces as part of the competition.

The Miss England pageant now features a make-up free round of the competition and requires their participants to submit an unedited, bare-faced, filter-free selfie as part of the entry process.

This bold move comes after critics claimed the competition sets an unhealthy standard of beauty and similar competitions have come under fire for being critical of hopeful young women’s bodies.

“Recently we have been shocked to see Miss England contestants as young as 19 undergoing lip filler treatments and even Botox, and so many entering with full faces of thick makeup covering their natural beauty,” said Miss England director Angie Beasley.

“We tell the girls they don’t need fillers, fake eyelashes and tattooed brows to enter our contest, but it just shows what a damaging effect edited social media images can have on young women’s self-esteem and mental health,” she added.

“The difference between what impressionable women see on social media and TV and reality is getting out of hand, which is why we decided to launch this round for the first time in the pageant’s history.”

Combatting the misleading effects of digital editing in social media is vital to the positive self-image movement. Young women are held to such impossible beauty standards through social media and reality tv that they feel the need to fill their faces with injectables just to seem normal by comparison to the edited images that fill their feeds.

While many will disagree with the concept of beauty pageants as a whole, this is definitely a move in the right direction.

Source: The Telegraph