"Beauty factories" are grooming 5 y/o's to become pageant queens.

Venezuela is renowned for its beauty queens. But for the girls hoping to win that coveted sash, the price of beauty can be, quite literally, deadly. 

Venezuela may only be the physical size of South Australia but it’s produced seven Miss Universes, six Miss Worlds and six Miss Internationals.

The South American country is renowned for being a beauty queen powerhouse — but as a recent report by the New York Post reveals, that beauty comes at a disturbingly high price.

Hundreds of finishing schools and beauty academies dotted around the country function effectively as “beauty pageant mills” — and in them, girls as young as five are groomed to become pageant queens, while 12-year-olds are coerced into procedures like nose jobs and bottom lifts.

“The dream of every girl in Venezuela is to be Miss Venezuela,” activist Taylee Castellanos from group NO to Biopolymers, YES to Life, told the New York Post. “They are promoting women who are completely fake, who have had their whole bodies redone.”

The oldest such school in the country’s capital Caracas is surrounded by plastic-surgery offices, and houses about 600 girls and women aged 5 to 29, San Francisco live reports.

The school, Belankazar, is home to 15-year-old student Yorgelys Mero, who told the Daily Mail she was considering a nose job at the suggestion of her instructors.

“I think I’m beautiful as I am … But if that’s something I need to do to make it to the top, I will, ” the teenager said.

The school’s director Alexander Velasquez told the Daily Mail that while most of the school’s students are poor — often making around $50 a month — they spent half on school fees, fashion, and beauty products.

Other pageant hopefuls at finishing schools around the country have plaster casts fitted to shrink their waists or, as the Daily Mail reports, have hormones injected to halt the onset of puberty and make them grow taller.

Girls as young as 16 have even been known to undergo invasive surgery that involves slicing a partial of their intestines or bowels so food passes through their body without being digested, allowing them to lose weight.

The disturbing pressure imposed on young women in Venezuela’s “beauty mills” was previously highlighted in 2013, when Miss Venezuela contestant Wi May Nava admitted to the BBC she had plastic mesh sewn into her tongue to prevent her from eating solids.

“It makes me lose weight quicker”, she explains to BBC interviewer Billie JD Porter on a special entitled South America: Extreme Beauty Queens, adding that she’d also had breast implants, a nose job and dental work.

When another contestant fainted on the same show, the Miss Venezuela pageant’s president Osmel Sousa told her: “If you faint like a beauty queen, get up like one.”

Other contestants were advised to have their teeth shaved down, the BBC special revealed; others yet underwent silocone buttock injections, sometimes given as birthday gifts.

Apart from the obvious toll on these young women’s self-esteem, this quest for physical perfection can cost women their lives: The Daily Mail reports that dozens of teenage girls die every year during cosmetic surgery in the country.

In the year to September 2013, 17 women died in Venezuela as a result of liquid silicone buttock injections alone.

But with the average Venezuelan woman spending 20 percent of her annual salary on beauty products, with most banks offering loan packages specifically targeted at plastic surgery, and with 4,000 people having cosmetic surgery every month in the country, according to The Atlantic — the country’s obsession with doll-like physical perfection doesn’t show any signs of disappearing.

Maria Trinidad, from NO to Biopolymers, YES to Life, told the Daily Mail the obsession with physical beauty was deeply ingrained in the country’s psyche — and was also down to limited options for women in the poor nation.

‘Every girl here dreams of being a “Miss”. We Venezuelans see those people as the perfect women,” Ms Trinidad said.

“When you live in a country where a beautiful woman has greater career prospects than someone with a strong work ethic and first-class education, you are forced into the mindset that there is nothing more important than beauty.”