Confessions of a Miss Venezuela

When the top 25 finalist for Miss World 2014 were announced live on Sunday night at the ExCel center in London, the exuberant applause was mixed with murmurs of confusion. Less surprising than the girls who remained on the stage was one noticeable exit: Miss Venezuela had been cut in the first round. Instead of taking her mark at the edge of the stage with the other finalists, she had gone backstage to change into the black mini dress worn by the 96 girls no longer in the running for Miss World. As she unzipped herself from a metallic blue gown embellished with a train of ruffled feathers, the other girls looked at her with equal alarm. "Why aren't you in the top 25?" they asked her as if she knew the answer—more off-put by her absence from the finals than their own.

When 23-year-old Debora Menicucci arrived in London from Venezuela four weeks earlier, her reputation preceded her—or rather, that of her country. Miss Venezuela is historically the one to beat. With six crowns, Venezuela has taken more Miss World titles than any other nation; the country also boasts seven Miss Universes (including current title holder, Gabriela Isler). Over 50 million people in Venezuela watch the broadcast each year—more than the World Cup—and during that time, crime rates actually plummet.

In Venezuela, girls as young as five are trained how to walk, talk, dress, and diet like a beauty queen. "Miss factories" across the country teach the very particular and grueling art of "winning" beauty. The girls who make it to the top of these schools, as Menicucci herself had, live in a house together, and from the moment they wake, until the moment they go to sleep at night, are working feverishly toward a crown.

"It's pretty difficult because you don't only have the weight of an organization or your family, it's the weight of a whole country," Menicucci told ELLE.com via a translator. "They expect you to do the maximum possible to bring the crown to the country again. And that's not easy because Venezuela has already won many crowns at global beauty contests...You have to keep trying harder than the girl who came before."

There are two kinds of girls who come to Miss World: those who are there for the experience and those who are trained to win. Menicucci first decided to train as a Miss because she wanted to change her body. "I was fat," she says matter-of-factly, two days before the Miss World finale. We were seated on the second floor lounge of the hotel that was temporarily home to 121 beauty queens. "Fat" is likely a relative term: In order to compete for the Miss Venezuela crown, you must be under 50 kilos (110 pounds) and measure 180 cm (5'9"). Menicucci, who says she gained weight by eating too much pasta, now meets these strict height and weight requirements. "In Venezuela, beauty is…it's superficial," she said.

"All girls in Venezuela dream of being Miss Venezuela," said Menicucci. In a country that is struggling through a severe economic crisis, political strife, and rampant violence (a former Miss was brutally murdered in a random massacre last year), being a beauty queen can provide a woman, and her family, an entirely different life. The winner of Miss Universe is given a clothing allowance and a Park Avenue penthouse; Miss World winners spend a year traveling the globe doing humanitarian work and achieve iconic celebrity in their home countries. Past winners—the most famous of whom include ELLE contributor Priyanka Chopra and Aishwarya Rai—have gone on to become beloved actresses, models, and corporate CEOs. For Menicucci, who was born in a favela (slum), and was often bullied, she grew up dreaming of the opportunities and esteem afforded to a Miss.

"I have always seen the crown not as a material thing, but as power," she said.

Menicucci especially liked the Miss World competition because of its focus on charity work. She works with children who have cancer and can't afford treatment. As an aspiring fashion designer, she makes hats and wigs for girls who have lost their hair and are ashamed to go to school with a bald head. "We always [teach] that everybody is the same—nobody is more than anyone else."

In the final days of the pageant, Menicucci was joined by her father, an Italian fashion designer, and her mother, who is a former model. Osmel Sousa, who is her license holder (the term for the director of each country's pageant), had also flown to London for the occasion. In recent years Sousa starred on Nuestra Belleza Latina, the most popular reality television show on Univision, in which girls audition to compete to win a pageant by the same name. In a BBC documentary that aired in February, reporter Billie JD Porter spent six month trailing Sousa's Venezuelan beauty queens. The footage shows him carefully inspecting his girls for weight gain and advising them on which surgical procedures would help them to fit the Miss mold. When one contestant faints from hunger he tells her, "If you faint like a beauty queen, get up like one."

When Sousa first met Menicucci, he encouraged her to train because of her "long back" but told her she needed to lose the extra weight. The BBC series films as one of the Misses sticks out her tongue to reveal a white gauze net that has been sewn into it so that she can only imbibe liquids. Other pageant hopefuls have surgically removed parts of their organs to facilitate weight loss. Sousa instructs certain girls to have their teeth shaved down and recommends nose, butt, and butt augmentations (silicone buttock injections are a popular, and sometimes deadly, birthday gift for Venezuelan teenagers.) Still, Venezuela only accounts for between one and two percent of all plastic surgeries worldwide, while the United States and Brazil account for 10 and 20 percent, respectively, according to a study by the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery.

Miss World's chairwoman, Julia Morley, says she is adamantly against these procedures. "It’s up to you if you want plastic surgery," she told me. "But I hate the people who make these kids into dolls—plastic dolls. They haven't any right to do that to them."

Menicucci, however, was raised in a culture in which plastic surgery isn't considered taboo. "If you don't feel good with your body and modify the parts you don't like, and then feel more secure, for me, it's something positive," she said.

After the Miss World 2014 winner was announced and the cameras stopped rolling, Menicucci changed backed into her shimmering feathered gown. Her legs ached, she said, and for that reason, she was glad it was over. This would be her final pageant. "I hope we keep winning more crowns because we have a lot of beauty, and we know what we are doing when we send a Miss," she said resolutely. "I showed the best part of me."

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