In pictures: The modern-day beauty contest

In apartheid-era South Africa, beauty contests were segregated, with black and coloured women excluded from the big contests. The feminine ideal was tall, blonde, and blue-eyed - as personified by Miss South Africa 1979, Veronica Wilson (left).

"I just didn't have a feeling of race," she says. "I didn't see the beauty competition as a political thing at all."

But since the end of apartheid, a new ethos has swept the scene: "black is beautiful". In 1992, for the first time, a non-white girl - Amy Kleinhans - became Miss South Africa.