They’re so beautiful it hurts.
Venezuela is the world’s powerhouse for pageant queens — producing six Miss Worlds, seven Miss Universes, six Miss Internationals and two Miss Earths.
Today, the nation will vie for another crown at the Miss Universe competition in Florida.
But the tiaras come at a high price, as the nation’s pageant pushers tell girls as young as 12 to get butt lifts and nose jobs, and 16-year-olds to get breast implants.
Other girls go under the knife to shed pounds, removing their lower intestine to process food faster. And Wi May Nava, a Miss Venezuela contestant in 2013, admitted to the BBC that she had mesh sewn to her tongue to prevent her from eating solid foods. That was in addition to breast implants, dental work and a nose job.
Parents even inject their 8- or 9-year-old daughters with hormones to delay puberty and make them grow taller, the Daily Mail reported.
“The dream of every girl in Venezuela is to be Miss Venezuela,” activist Taylee Castellanos told The Post. “They don’t promote natural women anymore. They are promoting women who are completely fake, who have had their whole bodies redone.”
Castellanos, 32, of Maracay, is a spokeswoman for the group NO to Biopolymers, YES to Life, which warns girls about the dangers of liquid silicone butt injections.
The activists are up against the nation’s powerful beauty academies — boot camps for glamour girls that encourage surgery and teach girls as young as 4 to catwalk.
Belankazar, the oldest so-called “Miss Factory” in Caracas, is surrounded by plastic-surgery offices. About 600 girls attend the finishing school.
Castellanos was never a pageant contestant but had implants in 2010 that prevented her from walking. Her group is livid over Venezuela’s modeling agents and schools, which often lure families looking for a way out of poverty.
Still, Belankazar’s director, Alexander Velasquez, said the schools are good for Venezuela and “promote a good self-image.”
He admitted that most of his pupils’ parents have low incomes — often making just $50 a month and spending half on school fees and dress and makeup expenses.
“I don’t believe Venezuela has the world’s most beautiful women, but we know how to produce beautiful, perfect women,” Velasquez told the Daily Mail. “That’s why we excel in all the international beauty competitions.”
Another pageant insider, Bruno Caldieron, who owns the franchises to seven of Venezuela’s pageants, allowed one of his models to wrap a painful plastic cast around her body to slim her waist.
“If the girl’s stomach isn’t perfectly flat, she should have liposuction,” Caldieron said. “If her nose doesn’t have that little curve, then she should have a nose job.”
Yorgelys Mero, a 15-year-old student at Belankazar, told the Daily Mail her instructors suggested she reshape her nose.
The teen lives in a crumbling house with her grandmother, who paid for braces to fix Mero’s teeth and is prepared to apply for a loan for cosmetic surgery.
“A lot of people have told me that I’m going to need a nose job,” Mero said. “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.”
Additional reporting by Isabel Vincent