A tourist looks at a flower in China's International Horticulture Exhibition in Kunming, capital of southwest Yunnan Province. (Photo : Reuters)
A different kind of beauty contest was held in New York in January 2015 with 68 women competing for the title "Best Butt." The winner was supposed to be the woman with the biggest posterior.
However, IBTimes reports that there was no media report on who won the contest organized by a cosmetic surgeon to find a model for their plastic surgery clinic that offers butt-enhancement procedure.
In June, a sex toy manufacturer launched a global competition to find the most beautiful vagina in the world, and this time, there was a winner. Connections.Mic reports that the victor was a Scottish woman named Nell. Because of the NSFW nature of that anatomical part, the contestants' real names were kept private.
The contest received 182 photos of female genitals, with the winner determined by 134,707 visitors of the website of the inventor of Autoblow2, a sex toy for men. Like the New York contest launched to find a model, Brian Sloan, organizer of The Vagina Beauty Pageant, was seeking a model for the next-generation Autoblow2 that would use a vagina sleeve to stimulate a male genital instead of using a rubber mouth.
Sloan explains that while sex toy factories already have stock vaginas, "I thought it would be nice to deduce what kind of vaginal appearance my customers prefer and then design vagina sleeves based on the feedback."
Ironically, it was the filmmaker boyfriend of Nell who convinced her to join because it offered anonymity and $5,000 to the winner and $2,500 and $1,250 to the runners-up. Nell, 27, often heard from the guy that her private part was cute and chubby.
Connections.Mic describes it as shaved and compact, and it looks like a smooth clamshell. The photo got 7.7 out of 10. The photo was of Nell's vulva shot from behind. Second placer was 23-year-old Jenny of Bavaria, Germany, with 7.3 and in third place was 20-year-old Anita of Hungary with 7.3 also.
Nell believes she won not so much for her genital's look but because of the way it was positioned, lit and photographed as she stressed the value of "the wrapping rather than the gift."
The contest has been criticized not for being pornographic but for pushing unrealistic female beauty standards. Dissatisfaction with how their genitals look is the reason behind the growing popularity of procedures designed to improve the appearance of the vagina such as labiaplasties.
The latest procedure that is non-invasive and costs less is vontouring or Protégé Intima. The U.S. FDA recently approved a thermal device used for the procedure which costs about $300 or only 6 percent of the $5,000 for labiaplasty.
