Venezuela beauties nip, tuck & win

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: Eva Ekvall says she was 17, a little overweight and dreaming of winning enough to buy a car when she entered her first beauty contest. Plastic surgery was the last thing on the young Venezuelan’s mind.

Then she met Osmel Sousa, the Pygmalion of her country’s beauty industry. Three months later, weighing 10 kg (22 pounds) less, her nose reshaped, and with breast implants, Ekvall was crowned Miss Venezuela.

“All of a sudden I was losing a lot of weight, so I needed boobs,” said Ekvall, now 25, who went on to take third place in the 2001 Miss Universe contest. “My nose looked bigger on my thinner face, so I needed a nose job,” she said. “Osmel just kept saying, ‘Oh, don’t worry, we can fix this and that. Everything will be fine.’”

Venezuela has won more major international beauty competitions than any other nation. Much of the South American country’s success can be attributed to Sousa’s skills in preparing contestants, from how to walk, smile and talk, to choosing cosmetic surgeries.

Cuban-born Sousa, 60, who has run the Miss Venezuela franchise since 1981, is responsible for most of the country’s five Miss Universe, five Miss World and five Miss International titles. He openly encourages surgery.

“This isn’t a nature contest,” Sousa said in an interview as contestants in swimsuits and high heels practiced choreography for the 2008 Miss Venezuela pageant, which took place in Caracas on September 10. “It’s a beauty contest, and science exists to help perfect beauty. There is nothing wrong with that.”

Owned by TV station Venevision, the Miss Venezuela Organisation numbers a plastic surgeon and a dental surgeon among its full-time employees. Dayana Mendoza, the reigning Miss Universe, is one of Sousa’s protegees. “Venezuela has been able to create a production line of beauty queens like no other country,” said Ines Ligron, director of Miss Universe Japan, in a telephone interview from Tokyo.

“Nothing is improvised in Miss Venezuela; everything is calculated. The girls are sculpted and rigidly trained.”

Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Centre for Bioethics questions Sousa’s endorsement of aesthetic surgery. “No surgeon can say that giving breast implants to a 17-, 18-year-old for beauty reasons is ethical,” he said. “It’s terrible that these pageants are turning into plastic surgery competitions and are no longer about real beauty.”

Surgical enhancement is permitted and is common among contestants, said Paula Shugart, president of the Miss Universe Organisation, a joint venture between billionaire real estate developer Donald Trump and NBC Universal Inc. “We don’t encourage it, but we don’t prohibit it either,” Shugart said by phone from New York. “Miss Universe in the 21st century wants to be a reflection of the world we live in, so we really don’t have a problem with contestants that had some kind of procedure done.”

Sousa, who calls the enhancements ‘touchups’, runs a programme to groom contestants. To get there, candidates need to catch the eye of Sousa or one of his scouts at the hundreds of fashion shows and beauty pageants they attend annually.

Around March each year, 300 young women head for Quinta Miss Venezuela, a salmon-pink villa with white iron gates where Sousa runs his boot camp. There, they come under the scrutiny of Sousa, his assistant Gabriel Ramos, dental surgeon Moises Kaswan and plastic surgeon Peter Romer. The three comment on the aspirants’ flaws and suggest what can be done to create a winner.