Being rich and gorgeous is not enough for a girl like Chessie Zialcita, She’ll stop at nothing to win the Miss Pearl of the Orient crown.

When Chessie arrives in Manila from Sydney Australia, she meets Marvin Mismo, the oily pageant impresario, Lally Sison, the jaded lifestyle journalist determined to take the pageant down, and the other keen contestants: an ambitious bottle bleach blonde from London named Carrie, a whitewashed girl from Toronto named Jennifer, an intellectual-bohemian Filipino pride activist from LA named Jamie, and a nice Filipina nanny working in Hong Kong, named Twinkle.

Secret love affairs, blackmail, and heartbreak culminate in a dramatic night where congeniality ends and cutthroat competition begins. Amidst the gossip, dance numbers, rhinestones, and backstabbing, we discover that beauty is the new ugly.

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