Little Miss Perfect

I was flipping through the channels on Directv last night (chilling out after a long day), and I came across a show called "Little Miss Perfect." This reality TV show chronicles the week before a little girl beauty pageant (Little Miss Perfect) in the lives of two of the contestants. In this particular episode, the two featured children were about six years old.

Now, I have objections to all beauty pageants (regardless of the age of the participants) on many levels, but I'll leave most of that discussion to a different place and a different time. The thing that was most striking as I watched what these girls go through was the use of make-up and hair styling products. Little girls as young as three years of age not only had their faces covered with everything from eye shadow to blusher to thick foundation, but they also had their entire bodies (or at least everything that wasn't covered by the scanty bikinis they wore in the competition) sprayed with a false tanning solution. Then, after all that, their hair was teased and sprayed repeatedly to produce bigger-than-life hairdos.

As I watched this purposeful poisoning of innocent little girls, I wanted to reach through the television and strangle a few necks. I am aware that the whole child beauty pageant business has been under attack recently (and rightly so, I believe), but I haven't heard any of those attacks address the very real physical danger to these children from toxic chemical exposure. Yet there it was, right before my eyes, plain as day. I'm willing to grant that much of this is due to just plain ignorance on the part of many of the adults, and I know that I have a different perspective on chemical exposure as I look at it through MCS eyes, but that does not excuse what I see as blatant child abuse with the potential of causing irreparable physical (not to mention psychological) damage.