Tiaras, tans and trauma: How reality TV — and real life — turned into a beauty pageant

A woman in a glittering pink evening gown saunters onto a platform. She looks impeccable: Her lashes are long, and her heels are high. Her shiny brown hair is pulled back into a demure updo. Her confidence is on display in her walk, and when she’s announced as the winner, joy overtakes her face, erupting into a dazzling white smile.

Amaya “Papaya” Espinal, a 25-year-old nurse from the Bronx, just won Love Island USA Season 7. She’s not a pageant queen, but she might as well be.

Beauty pageants are more symbolic than actually watched these days. Their viewership has declined since their height of popularity in the 1960s. The 2024 Miss America pageant, which was not televised and only available on streaming, was slammed by viewers for appearing “low budget,” and Miss USA 2024 viewership numbers on the CW dropped 28% from the previous year. Still, the iconography of a gorgeous woman competing with others for a tiara and sash remains influential. We all know a beauty queen when we see one. Pageantry has just taken on a new form.

Women prepare all year and all their lives to go on shows like Love Island now. They have demanding fitness routines, constant hair and skin maintenance, not to mention all the sprays, needles and lasers necessary to look perfectly smooth on camera. It’s like taking on a second job to spend an uncertain amount of time in the spotlight.

“Though pageant culture is declining … reality TV has supplanted [pageants] as an opportunity to be seen and compete, and for our culture to see beautiful young women in swimsuits,” director Penny Lane, whose four-part docuseries Mrs. America premiered at Tribeca Festival in June, tells Yahoo.

Lane and her documentary team followed contestants competing to win the crown at the pageant for married women 18 and older, which the film is named after. She was drawn to Mrs. America in particular because it felt “rebellious” compared to most other pageants, which exclude women who aren’t young and unmarried. For example, Miss America, the country’s most popular pageant, requires contestants to be single, childless and under the age of 28.

“If you think of it this way, that means older married women are not interesting to the beauty pageant world … only those who are sexually available,” Lane says. “If you're a woman, you're expected to spend your entire life killing yourself to look hot ... it's considered by many to be a virtue — the effort to present a beautiful exterior to the world.”

Physical attractiveness is only half of your score in a pageant. The other half comes from how well women are able to package their life stories into quick interviews with judges and answer an off-the-cuff question onstage.

“You have to quickly mine your deepest trauma — not always, but generally — then package it up to have a happy ending and a call to action to demonstrate that this thing you went through was worth it because it's now who you are,” Lane says. You have to do that to get a good arc on reality TV, as well — and in modern life.

‘Contestant energy’

Former pageant contestants say the demands of pageantry aren’t necessarily bad. They teach self-confidence and poise.

Laura J. Kaminer has been in the pageantry circuit for 33 years, 10 of which she spent actively competing. In 2003, she won Mrs. South Carolina United States. She’s now a pageant emcee, and her husband judges them.

“My parents were interested in grooming me for life by teaching me etiquette, poise and instilling self-confidence. I took modeling classes, which taught us things like how to walk, interview skills, basic manners and more,” she says. “Pageants were sort of like the 'recitals’ of modeling and manners class.”

Kaminer sees the “DNA of pageantry” all over pop culture, from the “contestant energy” people have on reality TV to the way people brand themselves on social media.

“The ability to have a stage presence, work a room and communicate publicly are all skills seen in traditional pageantry,” she says. “Shows like The Bachelor and other reality series have a pageant-like structure: Appearance, interviews, elimination rounds and even crowns. Pageantry has simply been rebranded.

Even as elements of pageantry are put more obviously on display in reality TV, the competitions themselves are evolving too. Megan Celestini, who won Ms. Woman Florida United States in 2017, tells Yahoo that pageantry is not just about how you walk and talk on stage anymore.

“Organizations, and even the judges in your interviews, are looking for you to translate your story into something compelling, visual and authentic that resonates with others,” she says. “Many of them seemingly now prioritize contestants who can maintain a social media presence, recruit new participants and connect with brands — all while staying current with cultural trends in beauty, fashion and digital storytelling. I’ve even had judges directly ask me how many followers I have on social media.”

She noted that Nia Sanchez, who stars in the reality show The Valley, was first Miss USA. Taylor Hale, a former Miss Michigan USA, appeared on CBS’s Big Brother. Hannah Brown, Caelynn Bell (née Miller-Keyes) and Hannah Ann Sluss are all pageant veterans who made their mark on Bachelor Nation. The lines between entertainment, pageantry and social media are more blurred than ever, so to win at any of them, you’ll need to blend them all. But some say pageantry’s reach is even more visible than on television; it's become ingrained in the way we interact with one another every day.

Marie Nicola, a pop culture historian, is also a former beauty pageant contestant. She was a pageant coach after she stopped competing, before appearing on reality TV shows. She has a different perspective.

“I don’t think that it’s that pageantry has taken over popular culture — more so than we now live in a hypervisible society. Hypervisibility has absorbed the demands of pageantry, in particular the pageant-like behaviours [like] polish, performance, public storytelling without any of the structure, ritual or reward of pageants,” she says.

Competing to be seen

Pageant skills are tools for survival. In a way, we’re all just competing to be seen. Influencers with pageant backgrounds demonstrate this daily. Nicola sees this in Jordon Hudson, a Miss Maine USA runner-up who made a name for herself as football coach Bill Belichick’s girlfriend and “creative muse.” She carries herself with the same calm they teach in titleholder training. Hannah Neeleman, a Mrs. America winner and Ms. World competitor known to her millions of followers online as Ballerina Farm, channels her mastery of femininity and aesthetics into her posts.

“This isn’t about competition in the traditional sense — it’s about the cultural pressure to curate your identity before someone else defines it for you, or worse, claims your curated identity for themselves,” Nicola says. “It’s not the judging that matters now, it’s the potential to be judged at all times. The camera might not be rolling, but the audience is still there. The discipline, narrative control and self-presentation that pageantry once required is now a baseline for public life.”

Mike Fahey is a judge in the Miss USA system. He knows we’re all being judged all the time online.

“More and more, we are asked to curate our own appearances, not just in the flesh but also as spectral selves,” he tells Yahoo. “It’s always been a contest between the real you and the you that you kind of almost are. To see well, in the flesh or as an apparition on a screen, is to be well-seen.”

Love Island USA winner Espinal is the reigning queen of reality TV, having won the summer’s biggest “pageant.” She’s now returning home to a new stage as a TV star and an influencer, having gained 2.9 million Instagram followers in the last month, according to social media data website Social Blade.

Though she might hold the crown, everyone on TV, social media and in real life is presenting and posturing all the time. It’s less of an indication that pageantry is seeping into pop culture, and more of a revelation of what our culture truly values: appearances.

“It’s all about presentation. It’s all about being a good little pageant girl,” Fahey says. “We regard the sort of person who can distill that way of living to a few well-chosen, well-put words as the sort of winner we want to be. And, more creepily, the sort of winner we also want to emulate. That trend didn’t originate with pageants, but they certainly helped practice it.”