Little girls preen, strut, pout, and beckon to the judges ‘come here baby’. They kiss their finger and press it to their backsides in a gesture indicating they are smoking hot.

They are instructed to flirt and to hold their tummies in.

A five-year-old begs not to have her eyebrows ripped out. Some girls are reportedly injected with botox to smooth wrinkles.

The suggestive dance routines, beauty rituals and sexualised costumes are all just a day in the life of US child beauty pageants, where parents invest thousands of dollars to turn their daughters into big haired, grotesquely made-up sexualised dolls. 

Now child pageant culture has infected Australia, with US Universal Royalty Pageants held in a number of cities, including Melbourne and new events planned at Gold Coast’s Sea World and in Perth.