Word: misse
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...trade, but an annual event in Japan's new beauty queen factory. For the last 10 years, Ines Ligron has been ordering young Japanese women to strip, walk tall, free their inner woman and wear lots and lots of makeup in an effort to seriously compete in the Miss Universe beauty pageant. And compete they have. The contest, long monopolized by Latin America's goddess industry, has now seen three of Ligron's frightened girls make it into the top five, including a first runner-up last year and, most spectacularly, 21-year-old dance student Riyo Mori...
Ligron, 44, is the national director of Miss Universe Japan, and her job is to create world-class beauty queens out of young Japanese women in a country that favors smallness over voluptuousness, reserve over unrestrained confidence, a demure smile over a sparkling grin. A former promoter at the IMG modeling agency, Ligron was handpicked by Donald Trump (who co-owns the Miss Universe Organization with NBC) to ramp up Japan's waning interest in the pageant. "When I came in 1997, Miss Japan was run by a broadcaster, and had turned into a show by men, for men," says...
...young women hunched over and wobbling in untrendy shoes, avoiding the sun to keep pale, hiding under too many layers of stockings and Bridget Jones underwear. "The first thing that struck me was - I have to liberate these women!" she says. Ligron improvised a one-woman finishing school for Miss Japan contestants, which involves stripping in front of a triptych of mirrors to learn to be comfortable with their bodies. The women would also live with the beauty producer for months to learn "how to be a woman, a gaijin [foreigner] woman, from...
Success in the global beauty market, however, is not necessarily embraced back home. Last year's Miss Universe runner-up Kurara Chibana has been a commercial hit back in Japan; and with her east Asian facial features she has snagged more than 100 magazine pages and was chosen to be the spokesperson for a popular shampoo Asience, which celebrates Asian beauty (other endorsers include the Chinese actress Ziyi Zhang). However, Miss Universe Mori fits the more statuesque, chiseled mold of Latin American and southeast Asian beauties. When a Japanese sports daily mistakenly published Miss Thailand's picture as Mori...
Hoxby said in her e-mail to her Economics Department colleagues that she would miss Harvard, but that she is heading to Stanford with "great enthusiasm...