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10 STRANGEST Beauty Pageants You Won’t Believe Exist

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Ten pageants that prove beauty contests can crown almost anything — camels, dolls, cows and Klingons included.

Forget the sash-and-tiara formula you know from Miss Universe. Around the world, organizers have built entire pageant circuits around contestants who never set foot on a runway in heels — because they don’t have feet, or hooves, or even a pulse. A new rundown from TheThings Celebrity, “10 Unusual Beauty Pageants You Won’t Believe Exist,” rounds up the strangest of them, and the details are stranger than the premise suggests.

• Miss Fat and Beautiful in Israel requires every contestant to weigh at least 175 pounds, a direct rejection of the waif-thin standard that dominates most pageant stages.
• Saudi Arabia’s Mazayen al-Ibl camel beauty pageant draws thousands of camels competing for prize money in the millions, judged on nostril shape, hump symmetry, and eyelash length.
• The list also features Miss Klingon Empire, staged at sci-fi conventions with contestants in full prosthetics and armor, alongside Miss Russian Army, Miss Barbie in Venezuela, Miss Milk Cow in Vietnam, and the International Goldfish Championships in Fuzhou, China.

Plus-Size Pride in Tel Aviv

Miss Fat and Beautiful and Beautiful in Israel flips the industry’s usual weight math on its head. Where most national pageants quietly enforce a slim ideal, this one sets a floor, not a ceiling: no one under 175 pounds gets to compete. It’s a direct answer to the waif-like standards that have defined pageantry for decades, and it’s earned a following precisely because it refuses to apologize for size.

Camels Worth Millions

Saudi Arabia’s camel pageants, including the well-known Mazayen al-Ibl, aren’t a novelty sideshow — they’re a serious industry. Thousands of camels are paraded and scored on criteria that would sound absurd anywhere else: nostril shape, hump symmetry, even the length of their eyelashes. The payoff is real money, with prize pools reaching into the millions of dollars, which explains why breeders take the grooming and presentation as seriously as any Kentucky Derby trainer would.

Nostril shape, hump symmetry, and eyelash length — the judging criteria for a camel pageant that hands out millions in prize money.

Klingons, Soldiers, and Dolls

Miss Klingon Empire takes the pageant format straight into “Star Trek” convention halls, where contestants compete in full prosthetics and armor and are judged on how convincingly they embody the alien warrior culture. Miss Russian Army swaps evening gowns for combat fatigues, with female military personnel scored on drills and weapons handling instead of a talent segment. And in Venezuela, Miss Barbie stages an entire miniature pageant world for customized dolls, complete with the pageantry apparatus scaled down to fit a plastic figure. If a beauty contest fan wants a sense of how far the format can stretch beyond human contestants, this trio makes the case in a hurry — a theme also explored in how America’s Next Top Model winners have fared since their own crowns.

Livestock and Ornamental Fish

Vietnam’s Miss Milk Cow pageant judges dairy cattle decked out in flowers partly on their milk production, turning a farming metric into a beauty-contest score. Meanwhile, Fuzhou, China hosts the International Goldfish Championships, where breeders show off prized ornamental fish in a contest built entirely around aquatic pageantry. Between the camels, the cows, and the goldfish, the animal side of this list makes clear that “beauty pageant” has become a format anyone can borrow, not a genre reserved for humans.

For anyone scrolling through viral roundups like this one looking for the next oddball list, TheThings Celebrity’s trending video coverage keeps stacking up entries just as strange as a camel judged on its eyelashes — which, at this point, might be the least surprising thing about any of these ten pageants.