Stunning Woman With a Skin Condition Is Redefining What It Means to Be a Beauty Queen

Bailey Pretak is challenging beauty pageant standards. The 30-year-old with a rare skin disorder has been crowned Miss Pennsylvania, Ultimate Queen, and Miss Congeniality — an award voted by fellow competitors.

Unfortunately, beauty pageants are generally made up of seemingly perfect looking women, which sets an unrealistic standard for the millions who watch them. Luckily, Pretak, who’s from Wilcox, Penn., is changing that. The beautiful blonde suffers from lamellar ichthyosis, a rare skin condition that from birth causes skin to dry and peel so excessively that it can result in infections, dehydration, and respiratory problems. “If I forget to lotion one of my arms or the bottom half of my legs, I know I will regret it a few hours into the day when my skin starts to tighten and cracks,” Pretak revealed to Caters. Luckily, summer is easier for her. “It’s so humid and my skin looks better, but in winter my hands and feet crack all the time sometimes a quarter of an inch deep,” she explained. “Because the skin on my hands and feet crack, it can be especially hard to walk and dance with this condition.”

For Pretak, the condition has resulted in emotional pain, as well. As a child, she was bullied and isolated for her constantly peeling skin. “In kindergarten, parents wanted kids moved of out my class or not to touch the toys I played with because they thought I was contagious and there was a stigma similar to leprosy,” she said. The disease is not contagious, but inherited.

However, she hasn’t let uneducated peers and bullies stop her from celebrating her true beauty. She was understandably shy as a child, but found an outlet onstage and began competing in beauty pageants two years ago. “Because of my experiences growing up, I never thought a person with ichthyosis could be a beauty queen, you get stereotypes in your mind about what one looks like,” Pretak explained. “I tried it and in my first year, I was Miss Pennsylvania at Pure International Pageants and a year later I was awarded a title for my volunteering, also I won Miss Congeniality.”

The bank teller by day is now traveling around the United States, using her beauty queen platform to educate others about ichthyosis and raise money for the charity FIRST – Foundation for Ichthyosis & Related Skin Types.

Thanks to brave women like Pretak and progressive beauty pageants like the Miss Amazing Pageant, a nontraditional pageant for girls and women with disabilities ages 5 and up, the definition of beauty has become broader and more inclusive.

And without pageants, Pretak would have never shed her insecurities. “I went from being the shy, insecure girl to being onstage modeling, it’s amazing how far I’ve come.”

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