Who is the most beautiful girl in the world? If you defer to the authority of the Daily Mail, and I usually do, it’s a 20-year-old French model named Thylane Léna-Rose Loubry Blondeau. Blondeau has been modeling since she was a small child — perhaps you remember her face from this 2011 Vogue Paris spread, which was controversial at the time for all the reasons you might guess.
But I’m not here to discuss whether it’s appropriate for 10-year-olds to wear red lipstick for magazine photoshoots, or what The Huffington Post or Good Morning America had to say about Blondeau’s parents in 2011, or if children should even be models at all. What I would like to know is when the Daily Mail plans to get with the times and stop referring to Blondeau as the “Most Beautiful Girl In the World.”
She’s a woman now! And I guess still a model, or at least someone people are interested in following on Instagram. Yet the Mail, in its stunningly comprehensive coverage of Blondeau’s day-to-day activities, refers to her exclusively by her former title. (It’s been difficult to determine which media outlet or government organization first declared Blondeau the most beautiful girl in the world; most articles say she was honored with the title in 2007, when she was six, but fail to mention the entity that made the claim.)
Anyway, the Mail can’t get over it.
I bet just once Blondeau would like to go to St. Tropez without the tabloids bringing up her childhood accolades. But no, every time she leaves the house, it’s “most beautiful girl in the world” this, “most beautiful girl in the world” that. It’s sort of rude actually.
If the editors at the Daily Mail wanted to make things right, they could start referring to Blondeau as the most beautiful WOMAN in the world, which would be accurate except for the fact that a cosmetic surgeon determined in 2020 that the most beautiful woman in the world is Bella Hadid.
So fine. I don’t have the perfect answer. But we can’t go on like this:
Best wishes to Blondeau in her adult life.
