A 22-year-old man, who pretended to be a woman, and fooled organisers to beat about 4000 women to the final of the Miss Virtual Kazakhstan pageant has revealed he is actually a man.
Ilay Dyagilev had submitted his pictures for the pageant as a woman, he called Arina Alieva. However, after making it to the final of the competition he decided to confess to the organisers they had been deceived, as had online voters from all over the ex-Soviet state.
After the revelation, his female “alter-ego”, Arina Alieva, was disqualified and replaced with another participant.
“I came through to the finale and decided to expose the identity of Arina Alieva when I realized it had gone too far. At the very beginning, there were around 4,000 applications from across Kazakhstan, but I got to the final,” he said.
He explained that he was an advocate of natural beauty, which many women nowadays show a lack of:
“My friends and I, we had a debate on beauty, and I decided to take part in the pageant. I’ve always been a champion of natural beauty. You can see that many young women look identically, the same make-up, the same style, and they believe that they are beautiful if they follow trends. I don’t think so.”
In 2017 in Russia, male student Andrey Nagorny, 20, posed as a lingerie model and won a contest. The ‘striking brunette’ used his girlfriend’s lingerie and makeup and called himself Ms Avacado. After the organisers discovered the truth in the contest on the Pacific island of Sakhalin, he was stripped of the title and prize.
