CHINA: Feng Qian, a 22-year-old student, has been crowned Miss Artificial Beauty, China's first pageant for women who have had plastic surgery. She beat 18 other modified contestants, including a transsexual and a 62-year-old pensioner.
Saturday's ceremony was a classic meeting of two obsessions in New China - beauty pageants and plastic surgery.
"I'm so excited, the result hasn't even sunk in," said Ms Feng, from northern Jilin province, shortly after the panel of judges awarded her the highest accolade in China's burgeoning plastic beauty business. She said her win had been a great boost to her confidence. A student of plastic surgery at Jilin Plastic Surgery Hospital, she produced certificates to show she had gone under the knife four times.
"Natural beauty and cosmetic surgery beauty are the same and they should be recognised as that," she said.
Ms Feng said the nips and tucks were to enhance her beauty, but also to see what it was like, since she planned a career in the business. Her operations gave her Western-style "double eyelids" and sculpted her face into its heart-shaped form, while liposuction made her thin.
"I used to be fat. Now my face is smaller and thinner, and I'm slim," said Feng, who is 172 centimetres and weighs a mere 54kg.
The first prize was 50,000 yuan, around €5,000, and Ms Feng is invited to Japan in 2005 for a plastic surgery conference.
The contest, held in the Pingju Theatre in Beijing, was a marathon event lasting nearly five hours as dozens of speakers - mostly plastic surgeons - addressed the crowd in what was a thinly disguised advertising shindig.
Cosmetic surgery is booming in China, with billions of euro spent annually on hundreds of thousands of operations, and clinics are popping up all over the country. The pageant came about after model Yang Yuan was disqualified from a contest because she had undergone plastic surgery. She sued the organisers - and lost. The organisers, however, said they were inspired by Ms Yang to run the pageant.
Transsexual Liu Xiaojing (21) was eliminated in the first round but named "most newsworthy contestant".