How To Find Local Beauty Pageants

Hi, I'm Liz Fuller. I'm the new boss at Miss Great Britain and a previous winner from 1997, and for the last thirteen years, I've been working as a TV presenter and producer at ITV and Channel 5. Today though, I'm going to be giving you advice on the beauty pageant world.

So, how to find local pageants? Okay, firstly, I would always say look in the newspapers because you want to see what the newspapers are covering. So, for instance, if there is a badly run pageant or a pageant that is perhaps a bit of a con because unfortunately, there are some, they're not really going to be talked about in the newspapers, are they? The journalists will say it clear. What you need to do is see which pageants have a high reputation, which ones are talked about, and also, ask the girls, approach girls, word of mouth, maybe sit on Facebook and approach the girl that just won Miss Swansea or Miss Cardiff and say, “Hey, can you give me some advice?” The other way to do it is look at some of the celebrities that have won beauty pageants in the past.

So for instance, you could try and approach Danielle Lloyd or google those girls and then see which pageants they did previously. You need to find pageants that have a good reputation if you're starting in a local area. Say, for instance, you're 17 or 18 and you want to enter a beauty pageant, there are lots of people that may rip you off and there are lots of photographers that are going to end up talking you into taking your top off and do glamour photoshoots.

It's not about that. So, always try and contact the national level pageant first and then work your way backwards. That's a good way to do it.

So, word of mouth, newspapers, you can google although my only worry when you hit the search engine for a local beauty pageant is sometimes, it's the local pageants that have the most money will be the ones that have paid the search engines to rank the highest so you've always got to be a bit careful. If I was you and I was starting out now, I would ask a local model agency, I would ask a really good photographer, I would even phone up the news desk on a newspaper because they know. They know what's going on because often a newspaper may be one of the judges at the local heat, so they can give you the proper guidelines.

That's how I would approach it, word of mouth and really do your research. You just don't want to fall into the trap of a bad pageant, okay. So, good luck.