Girls as young as 12 are getting cosmetic surgery such as butt lifts and nose jobs under the watchful eye of their mothers in a desperate and extreme bid to become beauty queens in Venezuela.
In a country obsessed with winning international contests like Miss World and Miss Universe fame-hungry teens are going to shocking lengths to conform to the beauty pageant ideal.
They include extreme measures to lose weight, with girls as young as 16 undergoing drastic surgery to cut out part of their intestines so food passes through their body without being digested.
Working it: MailOnline visited one of the hundreds of beauty academies in Caracas, Venezuela, dubbed 'Miss factories'. At Belankazar academy, above, there are 600 girls on the books, aged five to 29
Hopes and dreams: The girls - mainly from very poor backgrounds - hope success will bring them riches
Alumni: Among Belankazar's former students is the current Miss Venezuela, 23-year-old Mariana Jimenez, who spent a year at the academy before being spotted by one of the pageant show's talent scouts
Dedication: Mariana is currently preparing for Miss Universe - the top competition for beauty queens. She is spending 18 hours a day preparing for the Miss Universe finals in Florida, in January
Team: Mariana has a team of professionals who are with her 24/7 - including a nutritionist, personal trainer, protocol teacher, catwalk teacher, oratory coach, a talent assistant, make-up artists and clothing designers
Other methods to make themselves thin include sewing plastic mesh on girls' tongues to prevent them from eating solids, and having plaster casts fitted which shrink their waists.
Meanwhile, parents desperate to see their daughters crowned queens are injecting them with hormones, aged just eight or nine, to halt the onset of puberty and cause them to grow taller, our investigation found.
Disturbingly, most of the procedures are openly encouraged by the country's 'beauty academies', finishing schools for beauty queens attended by thousands of Venezuelan girls as young as four.
And many parents, who see their daughter's success as a route out of poverty, do whatever it takes - even getting into crippling debt - to finance places in the academies and pay for expensive surgical procedures.
Source: dailymail
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