Fake nails, hairpieces, false eyelashes and spray tans.
Flipping through channels the other day, I came across TLC’s new show, “Toddler’s and Tiaras” and I have to say, it gives me the creeps.
I’ll admit that I don’t know much about the little girl pageantry scene, but there’s something about seeing a six year old girl all “dolled up” in makeup heavier than most adults wear, that’s just wrong.
The show follows the preparations several families make to enter their young girls in beauty pageants. In one particular episode, three girls aged two, five and six were featured as they and their moms prepared to appear in a Little Miss Georgia Spirit Competition.
Two of the girls competing for the Miss Georgia Spirit title were “glammed up” and one was a natural girl. The show followed how one of these Georgia mothers hired a Pageant coach for her daughter to teach her how to walk while never dropping her smile and gazing at the judges. Instructing the five-year-old who had for the past three minutes kept a botox-like smile on her face to look at the judges in the eyes, the instructor told her that if she wanted to wear a crown on her head, she’d have to look the judges in the eyes, because there “are no crowns on the floor.” The girl was coached on how to move her arms, keep her posture perfectly straight and even make an obnoxiously pouty facial gesture at the end of her strut.
At the end of the practice, the coach asked the five-year-old’s mother whether she had purchased the eyelashes for the competition yet.
You guessed it; she was talking about fake eyelashes. On a five-year-old.
Young girls beauty pageants, which are a five billion dollar a year industry in the United States, apparently have an even worse side to them, because soon other extreme methods were shown on camera. There’s the mom who spray tanned her two-year-old child because the clothes would show better if the child “had a little color to her,” the mom who spent $2,000 on her little princesses’ pageant dress, and the one who took an orthodontic mold of her child’s mouth to make a “flipper” for her to wear. A flipper, the mom explained, is to cover up the “awkwardness” of a child who is losing her baby teeth, by basically making a retainer of fake teeth for the child to wear in competition.
I’m curious, who are these moms? And what happened to values in our society? These moms say that their little girls look and feel beautiful, but what they are creating is something artificial and dangerous.
To the moms that exhibit their children at these pageants, pageantry builds “poise and confidence” and gives moms the chance to give their children what they themselves didn’t have growing up.
What these moms don’t know, however, is that the 300,000 girls who walk on a stage each year in the United States wearing hundred dollar dresses and looking orange from their fake tans are beautiful. But not for the reasons society is giving them.
Promoting a superficial beauty and making people dependent on their self image as a reflection of their self worth is not only unhealthy, it’s devastating.
What these girls need to know is that real beauty is being confident and strong and knowing that at the end of the day, no matter how others judge you, it’s not going to change the way you see yourself.