Twenty-five-year-old Andrea Sophia Crystal King prevailed against nine other young women to win the Miss World Guyana Pageant 2022 last Sunday at the National Cultural Centre.
A Project Manager at the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company (GTT), Andrea represented Region Four (Demerara-Mahaica) and scooped awards for Beauty with a Purpose, Talent, People’s Choice, Multimedia, and the Miss World Guyana 2022 Head-to-Head challenge. Her only second prize was in the Miss Top Model competition.
Although she remains without a precise description of the way she felt when she heard her name, the new Miss World Guyana 2022 told The Scene, “so in that moment was a rush of emotions and also I was shocked… I started crying immediately because it’s everything that I’ve worked for… It was just an amazing feeling that I really can’t put into words…”
The young woman, who had always wanted to be in a Miss World pageant said that this year she felt a sudden urge to enter.
“It’s been something that I always wanted to do ever since I was a young girl,” she said. “I just never took the chance to do it. But this year I felt as though I just needed to go ahead, stop thinking about it and just do it. And so this year was the year that I needed to take that leap.”
Asked if she had been exposed to pageantry before signing up for the Miss World Guyana, Andrea said that although she had been in one as a child, she was never really groomed on how to gracefully walk across a stage and to fully learn about the ethics and importance of speech, posture, and confidence.
“The only other pageant I’ve been in is the Mother and Daughter Pageant when I was nine years old. I was in the middle category with my mom and we won that pageant in 2006,” she recalled.
“The training for the competition was unlike anything that you could imagine. We were trained on how to speak. We were trained on how to walk… trained on confidence, so it was a lot of character building and improving on your soft skills as well as your presence for the competition.”
She said that it all came with great sacrifices and a lot of challenges and noted that one of her main challenges was gearing up for the pageant while still executing her duties at work.
“…That was a very heavy weight to carry, but thankfully with the support of my family I was able to make it to work. Also I was given flexibility by my employers…
“These pageants aren’t cheap, there’s a lot of investment … that has to go into it, so financially there was a lot of sacrifices made to deliver in the competition at the level that I did.”
On pageant night, she graced the stage in a light-pink evening gown inspired by Guyana’s National Flower, the Victoria amazonica commonly known as the water lily. It was in her beautiful body-con, fish-tail dress that she was crowned.
Asked about the weight of the title and the wearing of the crown, the pageant queen said, “It’s a great sense of pride and honour and also a great feeling of responsibility because the Miss World title is a very prestigious one that comes with a lot of responsibility as an individual and to represent your country internationally.”
In the talent segment, she performed an interpretive dance, while for her Beauty with a Purpose project, she chose the responsibility of bringing financial literacy to every young person across Guyana.
“… My Beauty with a Purpose project … was launched in this competition and my plan is to continue rolling that project out until I can achieve nationwide coverage and to continue working with the Miss World Guyana team and my project team to develop this project and to get it moving…,” she said.
“My aim is to educate young people on financial literacy but not just on my own. [I plan] to advocate with the Ministry of Education to implement a Financial Literacy syllabus in our schools in every region. I believe that all children, all young people and all adolescents in schools need to learn financial literacy as part of their educational foundation. So while I’m doing financial literacy workshops, the larger goal is to meet with the Ministry of Education and start preliminary talks towards having the syllabus in schools.”
Andrea said the pageant was not a competition with the other young women, rather, they competed with themselves to be better individuals and the pageant has since built a sisterhood amongst them.
“I would like to think of it as an examination. All ten of us were in a room, we had the same exam paper to write and it was based on our performance and our individual test papers that the results are calculated… My sisters and I we have a great bond. We came out stronger than ever. Only we knew what it took; the sacrifices we made and everything that we went through… and that created a bond. We really are a strong unit coming out of this competition together,” she said.
The 25-year-old ambitious young woman takes the win as a family and friends oriented one, since she was greatly supported by everyone around her. “This is the greatest achievement that I could’ve expected to have this year,” she said. “It is an honour and my entire family is really proud to have this title in our family and they’re really proud of me for achieving this. Not just my family, but friends, supporters and even my employers who are really impressed and really happy for my achievement.”
As she prepares to represent Guyana on the international stage, Andrea said, “I plan on taking excellence and everything that I’ve given in this competition. We are going to work to deliver at an even better level. I plan on taking the warmth and hospitality from the Guyanese people and share that with everyone I meet on the international stage. I plan on giving my all, leaving nothing to be desired on the stage.”
