As a child she waded in muddy Philippine rice paddies, now teenager Janicel Lubina struts down runways for the nation’s top designers and is hoping to be crowned among the world’s most beautiful women.
Lubina, aged 19, is a star recruit in one of Manila’s beauty pageant boot camps, where shy, lanky teenage girls from remote farming provinces are transformed into poised Barbie dolls, who can preach about world peace in six-inch heels.
Beauty pageants are hugely popular with women in the Philippines, with many taking part in the hope it will lead to luxury living, success in high fashion and movie stardom.
“My mother was a maid. I can’t be a maid forever and get stuck in the province,” Lubina said before she auditioned for this year’s Binibining Pilipinas (Miss Philippines) contest.
Lubina mastered what is dubbed the “duck walk” at the Kagandahang Flores (Beauty of the Flower) training camp in Manila, where students are taught to perfect their beauty queen strut by swinging their hips from side to side like ducks.
Camp director and duck walk inventor Rodin Gilbert Flores approaches training with the precision of a scientist. He is a licensed chemical engineer and worked for a major glass company before shifting to entertainment.
“It’s is all about muscle memory. It’s calculated down to the movement of the hands,” he said. “The girl should also show her personality. She can’t be like a mannequin with no expression on her face.”
Flores ruthlessly watches as his students, wearing two-piece bikinis and high heels duck walk from one end of a dark covered basketball court to the other.
Sweat drips down their cheeks but they are not allowed to sit down until they perfect it.
“We’ll take in a girl, she will be in pain because of the duck walk, but the end result is she’ll be a head-turner,” he said.
Towering at 1.83m-tall in heels, raven-haired Lubina hopes to represent the nation in the Miss Universe pageant, which has a huge following in the Philippines.
However, Lubina’s camera-ready smile fades when she talks about her struggles back home in Palawan province, where she worked as a maid like her mother, while her father was recovering from a mild stroke.
“One time, I mopped floors for an entire day and my boss made me do it all over again because she didn’t like my work,” she said.
Lubina was discovered by a local make-up artist while she was out on an errand, walking on a dirt road. The beautician was amazed by her towering frame, she said.
She won 3,000 pesos (US$68) in her first pageant three years ago and has never looked back — for her the money has flowed in to the extent that she can support her family and pay for stroke treatment for her father.
Among her most memorable purchases was their family’s first ever television set, which she gave to her parents as a gift after she placed second in a contest in 2013.
“It wasn’t even a flat-screen TV, but it meant so much because my parents used to watch TV in our neighbor’s house... Now they can watch me on TV anytime,” she said.
Flores trained the Philippines’ last two big global pageant winners — Miss International 2013 Bea Rose Santiago and last year’s Miss Earth Jamie Herrell.
In total, the nation’s beauties have won the Miss International competition five times, twice each at Miss Universe and Miss Earth, and once at Miss World.
Local pageant fans are also among the world’s most devoted. In 2010, a YouTube video of four friends going berserk while watching Miss Universe got close to four million views, prompting fast-food chain KFC to put them in one of their TV commercials.
For Miss Philippines 1985, Joyce Burton-Titular, pageants are huge in the nation because Filipinos love to ogle and criticize glamorous women.
“It’s a cultural thing that starts with the admiration of beauty... We also enjoy being mean critics, whether a girl wins or loses,” Titular said.
Titular said pageants could also present an opportunity to escape poverty.
“Pageants these days are a great equalizer because you can come from the poorest of the poor and still win. In our country, pageants are empowering,” she said.
Titular said winning the national pageant 30 years ago gave her the confidence to try a careers in acting and television presenting.
For Herrell, beating 84 other beautiful women for the Miss Earth title last year has led to guest spots in television dance shows.
Unlike Lubina, Herrell comes from a wealthy family that owns a dance studio in Cebu City, a commercial center in the central region. She said she spends her pageant winnings on clothes.
However, Herrell takes her Miss Earth duties seriously, planting as many trees as she can in her home province of Cebu and other deforested areas to raise awareness about environmental issues.
“Pageants are relevant. Women can use them as channels for their advocacy,” she said. “You help the community and be beautiful at the same time, and that’s the tough part.”
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS