CHINA: A 20-year-old Chinese model wants compensation after she was disqualified from a beauty pageant for having had cosmetic surgery, in a case that is making people mull the question whether beauty really is only skin-deep.
Yang Yuan, from Henan province, made it through to the finals of the Miss Intercontinental beauty pageant in Beijing, but was disqualified after organisers spotted her in an advertisement for cosmetic surgery.
Ms Yang made 11 trips to the cosmetic surgeon and spent 110,000 yuan (€11,000) on cosmetic surgery in Beijing to change her appearance.
She considered herself plain-looking and saw it as a way of boosting her modelling career. She had a face-lift and altered her nose, lips and teeth.
"Having plastic surgery is just like somebody wearing high-heel shoes to make them look taller. Why did the organisers discriminate against me and not give me a chance?" Ms Yang asked .
She went to the media soon after she was disqualified and the organisers allowed her back into the competition, but she instead sued the company for discrimination.
The organisers argued a few facial adjustments were all right but not on a massive scale, and in the interest of fairness and objectivity they decided to disqualify Ms Yang.
The case has now gone before a Beijing court, which has yet to issue a judgment.
"I really want a more colourful life and a brighter future," Ms Yang said. "What I want is equal treatment for natural beauties and man-made beauties."
The case has received massive interest in China, as cosmetic surgery is a big issue in a country where modern ideas of beauty and cosmetics are still in their infancy.
"Who benefits most in China's rampant plastic surgery? Those duck-turned swans?" asked an editorial in China Daily.
However, the newspaper said the most likely winners were the cosmetic surgeons. "The beauty biz hyped by large-scale media circus has laid them new golden eggs," it said.
There are reports of hundreds of thousands of malpractice suits over botched cosmetic surgery, usually performed by ill-qualified or non-certified practitioners.
Beauty is a multi-billion-euro industry in China.
Shopping malls stage well-attended lingerie fashion shows and cosmetic sales are rising sharply every year.
Miss Ireland, Rosanna Davison, won the Miss World contest in the southern resort of Sanya last December, in what was China's first officially-sanctioned beauty pageant in 54 years.
Beauty contests were considered bourgeois and disreputable, a hangover from pre-communist days when rich and powerful men attended pageants to choose a concubine.
Now there are plans for a beauty pageant, especially for women who have gone under the knife. In fact, participants will be banned if they have not had a nip and a tuck.
"Man-made beauties should have a stage of their own," Xinhua news agency quoted the organiser, whose surname was given as Lu, as saying. "It's fair to have a pageant apart from that for natural beauties."