Victoria Li ’24

WUJUR (2025)

Abstract

Founded in 1952, the Miss Universe pageant is the most viewed and impactful beauty contest. We sometimes wonder why contestants from certain countries have consistently performed so well and placed in the semifinals and finals of the competition. Are there winning strategies? In this paper, we analyze the personal and country profiles of the semi-finalists and finalists of the Miss Universe pageants from 2010 to 2021, examining essential factors for winning. Based on the list of beauty pageant semi-finalists and finalists, we augmented their basic data of (1) personal profile, including height, age, education, and language spoken; and (2) country profile, including population, male/female ratio, tourism revenue as a percentage of GDP, GDP per capita, economic freedom index, and geographic regions. We fill in missing data via smoothing or manual calculation and build a forecast model with XGBoost. Then, we used SHAP to visualize and analyze the importance of each factor’s influence on winning and if it is positive or negative.

Our results show that GDP per capita and tourism revenue as a percentage of GDP have a strong negative influence on pageant placement, meaning that countries with lower GDP per capita and lower tourism revenue (as a percentage of GDP) tend to achieve better pageant results. This suggests that contestants from developing countries often perform better in the competition. Regarding personal features, contestant height is a key factor in success, while age, education, and language proficiency have minimal impact – likely due to the homogeneity of these attributes among participants. Overall, this study offers insights into factors influencing pageant success and demonstrates an end-to-end approach to data collection, model selection, and explainable AI-driven analysis.

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Citation (APA)

Li, V. (2025). Analytical explanations of beauty pageant winning factors. The Washington University Journal of Undergraduate Research, 2(2), 22–26.

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Li, Victoria. Washington University in St. Louis.
Corresponding Author. Send correspondence to li.victoria@wustl.edu.

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