When Saffron Rose Hart entered Miss Great Britain at the age of 26, she was, by beauty pageant standards, late to the game. “My friends had always done pageants as teenagers,” she tells i. “ I’d been to watch but never had the confidence to do it. Then I lost my dad to cancer at 47, and it changed my outlook on life. If there’s something that you want to do, you have to go and do it.”
Hart, who grew up in Hull and owned a beauty salon at the time, didn’t win when she first entered in 2016, but she got hooked on the experience, and entered again the following year. The second time she won, beating 50 other finalists to the crown. “I fell in love with it. I thought it was going to be a bit cheesy and people would be catty because they’re in competition, but instead I found this community of like-minded women, who were positive and driven.”
As well as the tiara, Hart won £7,000 worth of prizes, including a £1,000 beauty portfolio shoot, a full set of hair extensions and representation with a talent management agency.
On 21 October, 40 women from across the UK will be standing on stage in Leicester hoping to be crowned Miss Great Britain. In the pageant’s 77th year, finalists include Summer Le Conte, a 21-year-old hair extensionist from Boston, Lincolnshire, and Olivia Grant, a 21-year-old consultant from York.
The women will be judged by a male marketing executive of a hotel, a female CEO of a dress company, and Eden McAllister, who won Miss Great Britain in 2021 (and won the side title, Miss Beach Body). The final judge is Kat Henry, winner of Ms Great Britain in 2021, a new category for women older than the 18-29 age range allowed to compete for the Miss Great Britain title.
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“My mum competed in Miss Great Britain in the 1980s,” says Hart, who is now director of the competition. “It was very focused on the body. In the programme, they included the inches of your waist, your hips, your bust and your height. Although we still have a swimwear round, you were ‘crowned’ back then in your swimsuit, as if that was the big thing.” In 2018, Miss America scrapped the swimwear round, but Miss Great Britain decided to keep it.
Aimed at creating fun and escapism, the competition began at seaside resorts in the summer of 1945 under the title “Bathing Beauty Queen”. Organisers hoped that men would enjoy watching attractive girls, and women would enjoy picking their favourites. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, it grew as the finals were televised and the cash prizes became bigger.
Today, the pageant wants to portray itself as “empowering”, says Hart (this word comes up a lot in conversations with pageant queens). Miss Great Britain says it looks for a “lady who embodies all that a modern woman should: strength, intelligence, ambition, integrity and compassion”.
But Renee Engeln, psychology professor and author of Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women, wonders how much pageants have really changed since the early days. “I’m not interested in policing what is or is not feminist,” she tells i, “and it’s entirely possible that some individual women feel empowered by their participation in beauty pageants. But just because something feels empowering doesn’t mean that it is.
“It surprises me that so many people imagine we’ve moved beyond things like beauty pageants. Take a look at Instagram or TikTok. One of the things you’ll see is that more women than ever are living their lives as though they are perpetual beauty pageant contestants, spending hours every day performing beauty for others.
“Beauty pageants are a symptom, not a disease. Until we live in a world where women’s primary form of social currency is something other than how they look, beauty pageants will continue to be one more piece of detritus floating around in the toxic swamp of beauty culture.”
Hart is used to hearing scepticism and criticism of Miss Great Britain. “I would love somebody that thinks it’s bad for women to actually sit down and speak to somebody that’s involved,” she says. “It’s important that women nowadays hold on to as many choices and as much power as they want.”
For Engeln, this doesn’t stand up. “Why is it that when we want to ‘empower’ women, a go-to technique is requiring them to apply massive amounts of cosmetics [and] walk around on stage in bathing suits while strangers evaluate their bodies? If we were starting from scratch, trying our best to design an intervention that would empower women, can you imagine that anyone would come up with a beauty pageant as the answer?”
In 1970, the Royal Albert Hall hosted Miss World. 50 activists from the newly created Women’s Liberation Movement protested the sexism of the competition by throwing flour bombs, rotting fruit and water pistols at the stage, chanting, “We’re not beautiful, we’re not ugly, we’re angry”.
As regressive as beauty pageants may appear to some, they clearly have an enduring appeal. In 2019, 20,000 people applied for Miss England. Dr Harriet Fletcher, a lecturer in Media and Communication at Anglia Ruskin University, thinks it’s partly down to nostalgia. “The pageant started at a bleak time for Britain in the 1940s in a period of austerity. Miss Great Britain would have been a really fun escapist thing for people to enjoy. There is something inherently nostalgic about Miss Great Britain and wanting to recapture that old Britain in the 20th century; the 1940s fashion, the music, the Hollywood stars, the furniture, and the beauty standards.”
Dr Fletcher also points to the influence Ru Paul’s Drag Race may have had on appetite for pageants. “Queer culture influences mainstream popular culture, and fashion shows, catwalks, lux makeup and glamour is already central to Drag Race. On the show, these fashion runways are celebratory, they’re about owning and embracing your body and expressing your identity through fashion and makeup. I do wonder if Miss Great Britain can be viewed in a similar light.”
Kat Henry, who won in 2021, certainly feels that way. The London-born fitness instructor won the older age category as a black, plus-sized woman at the age of 38. “For somebody of my shape, size and colour to take home the crown was iconic. I’m proud of the achievement not only for myself, but also for representation and diversity.”
But the response to her win has been mixed. “I’ve had my fair share of racism, I’ve had negativity because of my size, I’ve been called all kind of names, I’ve had death threats; because people don’t feel like I’m the right person, or they feel everyone is trying to be woke and that I was chosen simply to fulfil a quota or racial diversity.
“That breaks my heart because I tried very hard and I want to inspire and empower other women of all different shapes and sizes, ages and abilities. People look at pageants and they assume it’s all about objectification, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. I’ve got up on stages in front of people with all my ugly bits. I’m a mother, I’ve got stretch marks and cellulite, but I’m proud to get out there and flaunt my body in swimwear, because that’s who I am.”
As positive as this may seem, Henry is still in a tiny minority in the pageant world. Things may seem to have improved since 1974 when Helen Morgan, from Barry, was forced to resign four days after her victory, when it was discovered she was a single mother with an 18-month-old son. Yet in 2016, Zara Holland was stripped of her title after having sex on ITV2 reality show Love Island. No explicit scenes were shown, but in a statement, Miss Great Britain organisers said: “The feedback we have received from pageant insiders and members of the general public is such that we cannot promote Zara as a positive role model moving forward.”
“Looking at the rules,” says Dr Fletcher, “it looks like Great Britain has some quite retrograde ideas about the kinds of women they want competing in the pageant. It seems that they are still very concerned with perpetuating an image of femininity that is about modesty, decorum and being ladylike. How modern is this, really?”
Is there a way to make Miss Great Britain truly progressive? June Purvis, Professor Emirata of Women’s and Gender History at University of Portsmouth, doesn’t think so. “I don’t think it is possible to separate a beauty pageant in 2022 from the decades of objectification and sexism that they are originally associated with. It is time it was dropped and energy put into other arenas. It has passed its sell by date.”
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For now though, the competition looks like it’s here to stay. As the contestants get ready for the final in which the rounds include fashion wear, swimwear, evening wear and an on-stage interview, what will judges be looking for on the night?
“A girl who’s not got stars in her eyes,” says Hart. “She’s not wanting to become famous. She’s passionate about the charity cause. She’s genuinely wanting to help people. We want the girls to be themselves, we don’t want to compare them to anyone else.”
The Miss, Ms and Ms Great Britain Classic competition will take place on 21 October.