Twenty camels were unceremoniously disqualified from a beauty pageant in Muscat, Oman, after veterinary experts discovered banned cosmetic procedures designed to cheat their way to the top.
These events, regularly held across the Gulf States, carry significant cultural prestige, celebrating Bedouin heritage.
Thousands of camels compete for prizes worth millions of pounds in categories like coat, neck, head, and hump. Judges prize shiny hair with defined colour, a long and elegantly wide neck, a large head with pouty pendulous lips to match long dark eyelashes, and a shapely hump with excellent posture.
In this year’s Muscat competition, breeders sought an edge with Botox injections to plump lips, muscle relaxants to soften faces, and silicone wax to enlarge humps. Officials promptly disqualified the 20 offenders.
It is not, however, the first time the camel kingdom has found itself at the centre of such a scandal. In 2018, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz Camel Festival the Super Bowl of snout-and-hump pageantry called Miss Camel disqualified a dozen aspirants whose lips had been suspiciously injected with fillers and botulinum toxin.
The breeders had apparently consulted the same discreet veterinarians who once specialized in racehorses but had pivoted to the more lucrative desert set.
In 2021, over 40 camels were booted from Saudi Arabia’s pageant for similar enhancements like Botox. Judges deployed advanced technology to detect the tampering, according to the state-run Saudi Press Agency.
Saudi Arabia has since launched a project to issue special passports for camels, aiming to regulate and develop the kingdom’s camel sector.