“Beauty is power,” goes a line from a Sondheim musical. But for a country whose idea of beauty is rooted in power, the line probably bears reversal: Power is beauty. When Chelsea Manalo was crowned Ms.
Philippines Universe 2024, the 24-year old beauty from Meycauan, Bulacan broke a glass ceiling: she was the first Filipino of African-American descent to win the contest. When her name was announced as the winner of perhaps the most gleeful, the most confetti-sprayed of all Filipino battlegrounds, this writer could not have cheered any louder, and could not have been more properly surprised. Chelsea Manalo was not your traditional beauty contest queen, at least not in the Philippines.
For a nation obsessed with whiteness, or, at least whitening products (and their coy implications on skin tone preference), Manalo’s win was unprecedented. While three mestizas of mixed heritage have won the Ms. Universe contest in less than a decade—all of them with Caucasian mix—here was another kind of mestiza: her skin a deeper, duskier shade of morena.
For a country thrice-colonized, this means beauty standards that have been influenced by two Caucasian countries—Spain and America for a joint three hundred and eighty-one years—and an Asian one, having been occupied by Japan for four years during World War II. This may account for beauty standards that have been predominantly Caucasian since the turn of the past century, and Asian for the past decade and a half when the Korean Ha.