For these pageant queens, beauty really, really is pain
We’ve all heard some shocking diet trick stories in our time – but this one will make your jaw drop.
The beauty industry is notorious for inspiring extreme dieting tricks among models and pageant contestents. Last year, we were horrified to learn some budding models resort to swallowing cotton wool balls to make themselves feel full.
But a new documentary on beauty pageants has revealed something even scarier. “Extreme Beauty Queens”, which aired in the UK earlier this week, followed Miss Venezuela contestants to find out the lengths they were willing to go to for a sash. The result, as Cosmo US reports, was this:
This contestant, named Mayer, had a patch of plastic mesh sewn on her tongue to make it painful to eat solid foods. Yes, you read that correctly. Mayer hoped this trick, along with the plastic surgery she underwent on her breasts and nose, would win her the tiara and give her family the means to leave their home in the Caracas slums.
Evidently this isn't just a one-off, "WTF" incident. The 'tongue patch' was developed in 2009 by Dr Nikolas Chugay, a Beverley Hills-based cosmetic surgeon, and it has been especially popular in Venezuela over the past two years. The patches can only be worn for a month at a time, to prevent the mesh fusing to the surface of the tongue.
Horrifying.
Should 'the tongue patch' be illegal?
