As a young girl, I looked up to pageant queens, hoping to one day look as gorgeous as they were. I admired their perfect dresses, graceful walks, and glittery crowns. I was fed these unrealistic expectations of beauty through my television every year when I sat down to watch these glamorous contests. With our society changing, we have realized how detrimental these beauty standards are to young girls, but recent events have showed that we still have a long way to go to fix this problem. On July 30th, the 2016 Miss Teen USA pageant took place in Las Vegas, Nevada. This annual contest consisted of 51 gorgeous, young contestants who would have all been very deserving of the crown.

This group of young ladies was very diverse and showed a lot of different variations of beauty, but once the judges narrowed it down to the top five contestants, the internet went crazy. All of the top five were blonde haired, white girls with incredibly similar facial structures. Things got even worse when the winner, Karlie Hay, was discovered to have used racial slurs on her personal twitter account in the recent past. I think that these two incidents are a horrible example for young girls who watch this pageant and look up to its contestants. Miss Teen USA needs to step up its game and realize that women of all colors are beautiful, too.

Don’t get me wrong, the girls who were chosen for the top five were all gorgeous young ladies, but they all looked like clones of each other. This year’s contest seemed to be a flashback to what we would imagine this pageant looked like 60 years ago, considering all of the finalists were blond haired, white girls. While this could have been coincidental, and I do not think that they should take away an opportunity from someone who is deserving of something in fear that they may not look politically correct, I simply don’t understand how five women who look exactly the same would stand out as being better than the rest of the contestants.

What kind of message is this supposed to send to young girls who look up to these contestants? Holding a pageant with an outcome like this is indirectly telling young girls that they need to be blonde, fair skinned, and look exactly like these five girls to be beautiful or to be wanted. The girls in the top five were all beautiful and qualified, but so were all of the other 46 girls who competed. While I, again, don’t think that these five women should have been cheated from their accomplishment because of the way they look, I think that they all did the exact same job in the pageant because they all looked like the same girl in different dresses.

The fact that these five, who all offered the same exact things to the competition, were chosen over so many other beautiful women who offered a cornucopia of diverse types of beauty shows that the judges simply thought that their brand was the only kind of beautiful, which is not true in the slightest.

Another problem with this year’s Miss Teen USA pageant is the fact that the winner, Karlie Hay, has frequently used the N-word in the past on her twitter account. First of all, this shows how disorganized the pageant is and how careless and insensitive the winner is. Why didn’t the pageant screen the twitter of its contestants before choosing a winner? They knew that whoever they crowned would reflect their company as a whole and would be in the public spotlight so it is pretty careless that they would not bother to check their social media accounts, especially in this age where social media is so important.

On the other hand, while Karlie should have never even said these things in the first place, she should have cleaned up her social media pages before this pageant. Secondly, this is also a terrible example for children. Why should someone who carelessly throws around hurtful words be rewarded for her actions by being given this crown over many other women who have never done such a thing? This teaches girls that as long as you’re pretty, blonde, and white, you can get away with whatever you want. The fact that Karlie ever said these things should have disqualified her from the contest in the very beginning, so someone like her winning it all is a very bad example for young girls to look up to.

This year’s pageant upset many people and sparked a lot of talk, so I am hoping that the Miss Teen USA Pageant learns from this and prevents it from happening in the future. Displaying this type of favor over girls who look like Barbie only makes things worse for young girls in a world where they are constantly being pressured to fit society’s mold of beautiful.

Women of all races, hair colors, skin colors, and eye colors are beautiful in their own unique way. Instead of putting down and deeming women who are any different from the typical “All American Girl” of the 1950’s, we need to appreciate all different types of beauty. America is a melting pot of cultures, and that was simply not celebrated in this competition. If we want our young girls of today and tomorrow to be confident and know that they are all beautiful, a change needs to be made.