Miss Nepal Organisation has been receiving a lot of scathing backlash on social media from Nepalese people and pageant fans after an audition video of the 22-year-old Ashmita Maharjan for Miss Nepal 2019 went viral. In the video, the participant states her genuine reason for not wearing makeup and contact lenses. She gets reprimanded by one of the female judges Rachana Gurung Sharma and was considered being disrespectful towards the Miss Nepal platform.
The entire incident infuriated many people and the way the female judge chose her words to address the participant did not go down well with many pageant fans. People started questioning the integrity of the platform and its claim to be a platform for women’s empowerment.
To address this issue and share her opinion Miss Earth Nepal 2018 Priya Sigdel took to her social media and shared her thoughts. She said, “My teeth are said to be Mount Everest but still I am beautiful. The Viral Video has a lot of things that shouldn’t have been portrayed as it has been.”
She further added, “My performance from Day 1 to International pageant has really less to do with makeup and whatever I was able to achieve was not only because of my makeup skills but was more about me and my team's HARD WORK and work I have been doing from years as an activist.”
However, the beauty queen did express the importance of knowing how to do one’s own makeup and managing everything by yourself in the international beauty pageants but the emphasis is more on the makeup. According to her women with real knowledge should be appreciated and the skill of learning makeup can be acquired however something like ethics can’t be learnt.
In addition to this, the diva also expressed how the expectations from Nepal to perform better has been increasing and from a judge’s point of view, it was fine to ask about the makeup. She further requested to all the pageant fans to not judge the hard work and struggles of previous Nepali beauty queens who had brought pride to Nepal through Miss Nepal Platform.