It’s 2 a.m. in a convention hotel off a Bangkok underpass, and 27-year-old Nadeen Ayoub, the first-ever Miss Palestine, is just getting back to her manager’s room. She’s peeling off a corset she’s worn for the last 16 hours. “You see? Look what happens to me,” she says, gesturing at the deep grooves lining her ribs and stomach. She tosses the corset over a table stacked with makeup. It lands on a poof of ivory, one of the 30 gowns she brought for the competition. “It really bites into you,” she says, but she keeps smiling. She knows how it looks to complain about a beauty pageant given what’s happening back at home.

Ayoub is one of 122 women from around the world competing for the 74th Miss Universe crown. Contestants are in the final days of a three-week tour in which they’ve been shunte

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