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Pageants are 'serious business' back home
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Back in their home countries, beauty pageants are serious business, maids here told The Sunday Times. Winners can get endorsement deals, modelling contracts and even movie appearances. There are some 240,000 foreign domestic workers in Singapore, many of them from Indonesia and the Philippines.
In the Philippines, for instance, beauty queen mills have sprouted all over the nation. At these boot camps, lanky and slightly awkward young women - some from remote farming villages - are transformed into polished gems, ready to flaunt their bodies and flash their camera-ready smiles in front of thousands.
In Singapore, training sessions for the pageants are less ambitious. One typical session on a Sunday afternoon would see a bevy of young women, in their tank tops and rah-rah shorts, applying make-up in front of a wall of mirrors at one end of a room. Later in the day, they would try to perfect the "duck walk", where they swing their hips from side to side.
Many beauty queen wannabes fill their Sundays - their only days off - with hours of rehearsals. They also take lessons in finding their most flattering angles for poses and answering pageant questions, among other things. There are also glamour photo shoots and visits to promote the sponsors' shops.
Some do not mind the excessive fees, wryly admitting that they might not even make the cut for the selection rounds of pageants in their home countries.
Filipino maid Mary (not her real name), who participated in a beauty contest here this year, said pageants are popular back home. The 31-year-old, who also took part in a pageant in the Philippines last year, said: "I've always wanted to join pageants. It is fun. And there are more chances to win here compared with back home in the Philippines."
Calvin Yang