Sunday Times 2
Venezuela’s brutal beauty business
Girls as young as 12 are getting cosmetic surgery such as butt lifts and nose jobs under the watchful eyes of their mothers in a desperate and extreme bid to become beauty queens in Venezuela.
In a country obsessed with winning international contests like Miss World and Miss Universe fame-hungry teens are going to shocking lengths to conform to the beauty pageant ideal.
Mariana is currently preparing for Miss Universe - the top competition for beauty queens. She is spending 18 hours a day preparing for the Miss Universe finals in Florida, in January
They include extreme measures to lose weight, with girls as young as 16 undergoing drastic surgery to cut out part of their intestines so food passes through their body without being digested.
Other methods to make themselves thin include sewing plastic mesh on girls’ tongues to prevent them from eating solids, and having plaster casts fitted which shrink their waists.
Disturbingly, most of the procedures are openly encouraged by the country’s ‘beauty academies’, finishing schools for beauty queens attended by thousands of Venezuelan girls as young as four.
But the craven pursuit of physical perfection – or rather the Barbie-doll look of Miss World winners – often ends in bitter disappointment for the starstruck youngsters, and sometimes tragedy.
Dozens of teenage girls die every year during cosmetic surgery in the country. A recent campaign aimed to educate Venezuelan girls about the dangers of liquid silicone butt injections before the age of 12 to ‘get to them early, as parents tend to offer these injections as 15th birthday presents’.
The fact that Venezuela has produced more winners of international beauty pageants than any other nation is a source of national pride.
Their tally so far includes six Miss World, seven Miss Universe, six Miss International and two Miss Earth crowns – more titles that any other country.
Debora Menicucci, 23, will try and make it seven Miss World titles next week when she competes in the finals being held in London.
The annual Miss Venezuela contest – the precursor to Miss Universe – is the country’s most popular television event, watched by two-thirds of the nation’s 30 million population.
The quest for success has created a multi-billion pound beauty industry aimed at producing the world’s most perfect pageant queens.
A week before the grand final of the most important contest of them all, Miss World, MailOnline visited one of the hundreds of ‘beauty academies’ which have sprung up in the South American nation to hone wannabe beauty queens.
Dubbed ‘Miss factories’, the schools train girls how to strut down a catwalk, walk in high heels, manners and diction, as well as giving advice on reaching the beauty queen standard of perfection – 90, 60, 90, referring to breast, waist and thighs.
Situated on the first floor of an office block in the Sabana Grande district of downtown Caracas – incidentally the country’s plastic surgery boulevard – the Belankazar academy has 600 girls on their books, aged five to 29.
Among its former students is the current Miss Venezuela, 23-year-old Mariana Jimenez, who spent a year at the academy before being spotted by one of the pageant show’s talent scouts.
The girls spend a morning or afternoon at the school every week, sometimes travelling for hours from poor outlying districts of Caracas, or even rural areas outside the city.
Belankazar’s director, Alexander Velasquez, said most of the girls are from middle or low-income families, with most parents on the minimum wage of around $50 a month.
The school’s fees are $10 a month, although with other expenses such as fashion shows, purchasing dresses and make-up, parents end up forking out around $25 on average – which for some amounts to a HALF their monthly salaries.
Mr Velasquez told MailOnline: ‘Most of the families are very humble. Some have two or three girls in the academy. They see their daughters as a chance for them to live a better life. Winning Miss Venezuela is the certain way for a poor girl to have money, fame and celebrity.
Many girls opt to have a plastic mesh sewn onto their tongue, making eating solid food unbearably painful.
He said many girls – often pushed by their parents – go to extremes to achieve the look that could win them the most coveted tiara of them all.
Mr. Velasquez said that the average age for a girl to get a breast implant is 16. He said: ‘To be a beauty queen the breasts can’t be too large or too flat. Often the surgery is just to change slightly the shape or the size. It also depends on which contest the girl wants to compete in.’
And he told of other aspiring queens who, unable to lose enough weight to reach the required measurements, have taken drastic measures to get thin. Many girls opt to have a plastic mesh sewn onto their tongue, making eating solid food unbearably painful.
And some girls, aged 16 and 17, have subjected themselves to even more invasive surgery, cutting a part of their intestines in a desperate attempt to lose the pounds.
He said: ‘Going on a diet is expensive, so for many having the plastic fitted to their tongue is a cheaper way to lose weight.
‘Removing the lower intestine means that food exits the body faster. The girls who do this are the ones who aren’t disciplined enough to lose weight by willpower alone. It is an extreme measure, a last resort to make themselves thin.
‘Sometimes it is the girls who choose to do these things, or sometimes it is the parents choice, and sometimes both the girls’ and the parents’ decision.
Perhaps most disturbingly, some parents of girls in the academy who have been warned their daughters may not achieve the minimum beauty queen height of 5ft 9ins have opted for hormone treatment to stave the onset of puberty.
‘I don’t believe Venezuela has the world’s most beautiful women, but we know how to produce beautiful, perfect women. That’s why we excel in all the international beauty competitions.’
For most of the girls, their dream is to be noticed by organisers of Quinta Miss Venezuela, a boot-camp where contestants are whittled down from 500 to the final 60 who will compete for the coveted national title.
And for the lucky few who reach the top, the rewards are immense. Winners are catapulted from obscurity to overnight fame and fortune.
Dayana Mendonza, who won Miss Venezuela in 2007 and Miss Universe in 2008, received a £15,000 diamand tiara, an apartment on Park Avenue in New York plus living expenses during her year-long reign.
She also received a two-year scholarship to the New York Film Academy’s acting programme, a full wardrobe and shoe collection and a personal stylist, prizes which total over £250,000.
One of the central figures of Venezuela’s beauty industry is Bruno Caldieron, 42, who owns the franchises to seven competitions, including the popular Miss Sport, and is also the agent of the current Miss Venezuela, Mariana Jimenez.
Mr Caldieron stars in a TV reality show, Extreme Beauty, where he whittles down teenage girls to compete in the Miss Sport contest.
In an interview with MailOnline at his home in the upmarket Bello Monte district of Caracas, the beauty pageant guru admitted that the industry actively encourages girls to correct ‘imperfections’ with cosmetic surgery.
He said: ‘We don’t want to create lookalikes, but there is a type of look that always wins, and we need to produce that type. And if to get to the top we need to do some retouches, then no problem.
‘If the girl’s stomach isn’t perfectly flat, she should have liposuction. If her nose doesn’t have that little curve, then she should have a nose job.
One of the girls who went through Mr Caldieron’s boot camp was Oriana Gomez, who eventually came second in the Miss Sport contest.
The reason she didn’t win, he said, was that ‘she was fat. She didn’t want to lose the weight. I couldn’t handle her.’
We tracked down Ms Gomez, who spoke to MailOnline in a coffee shop in the centre of Caracas.
The 21-year-old beauty was in visible pain as she spoke. Later she lifted her top to black strap tightly wrapped around her stomach, crushing her waist to just 25 inches (63 cm).
The strap replaced an even more painful and restrictive plaster cast stomach wrap which she had worn for two weeks before having it removed three days earlier. It was just one of the numerous attempts she had made to lose weight. ‘I still have the bruises all over my torso,’ she said.
But by far the worst was the slimming method used by many budding pageant queens, a plastic mesh which is sown onto the tongue, making eating solid food so painful it is impossible.
She said: ‘I was 18 and competing for Miss Venezuela. I wasn’t losing weight faster enough, so I was advised to have the plastic fitted. It was something I was advised to do directly by the organisation.’I wore it for a whole month and I lost 6kg (13lb) . But the pain was unbearable. And it had another side effect once I’d had it removed, when I started eating solid foods again I put all the weight on again.’
But Ms Gomez, who is now hoping to compete in Miss Venezuela for a second time, said she would consider such extreme methods again in order to achieve her dream.
© Daily Mail, London