Kristina Pimenova: 9-Year-Old Dubbed 'Most Beautiful Girl In The World', Is This Wrong?#ICYMIFriday, 28 November 2014
Natasha Bird
She's got big, blue, piercing eyes.
The curves of her top lip meet in a perfect cupid's bow and she's got dimples to rival Cheryl Fernandez-Versini's.
All of these features, plus a few more, have led to Russian-born Kristina Pimenova being widely labelled "the most beautiful girl in the world."
Celebrating female beauty is a nice, so what's the issue here?
The thing that people seem to be missing here is that, at the heart of all these stories about looks and attraction, is a child.
Kristina Pimenova is nine years old.
The young girl was first thrust into the world of modelling at the age of three-years-old and she's since had campaigns for Roberto Cavalli, Dolce & Gabbana and Armani.
The biography on her Facebook account claims: "Kristie soon realised how much fun [modelling] was, especially catwalk and fashion shows. She's been having a blast ever since and is still loving every minute of it!"
The fact that she is a model isn't really the issue - there are plenty of young girls and boys out there modelling and acting and having a brilliant time.
The problem lies in the attitudes of everyone else around her.
Kristina's Facebook page has over two million fans and people "like" and comment on the pictures posted there in the hundreds-of-thousands.
Some commenters are innocent in their intentions, congratulating Kristina and encouraging her modelling career.
Some remarks, though, are unnerving.
The worst comments (those with overtly sexual overtones), it seems, have been deleted - as it warns will happen in the page biography.
Many of the comments that remain, howeve, are still worrying.
A lot of them stem from adult men and they aren't using terms like "sweet" or "cute", they're using terms like "beautiful" and phrases like "I think I'm in love" and "marry me."
Some with themes of enchantment like "what sorcery is this?" are a little too reminiscent of the terminology used in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita - a book about pederasty and an awful, sexual relationship with a young girl, in which the adult male claims to be helpless against Lolita's magical charms.
Even more worrying, there's a line in the Facebook page's biography that states: "Kristina's pictures cannot be used for role playing," suggesting that Kristina's parents are aware of the strange trend for stealing young children's photographs to be used in other people's online fantasies.
The larger part of Kristina's fanbase may be made up of innocent well-wishers, but clearly there is a portion that aren't.
So then, at a time when allegations about child abuse seem to make it into the press at an increasingly terrible rate, perhaps we should be taking every measure we can to prevent the image of young girls from being sexualised.
For even those with the purest of intentions, getting into the practice of evaluating a child for their beauty and aesthetics, rather than anything else, is probably not a good idea, because it risks justifying the less innocent behaviour of others.

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she fine but no fine reach

These caucasians really have weird beauty standards. Looks like any regular caucasoid child to me.