How do most kids get into pageants? I ask because my daughter dances and I know it is a bit of a slippery slope between just doing an hour on Saturday to being involved in comps, in a troupe and then as a soloist - which is even more time and money. Like the first year I borrowed make-up for the concert and now we have a serious business make-up case full of crap, all our own hair styling equipment, expensive fishnets and dance underwear, bit by bit we gear up more and more and have more requirements to meet. It sounds like you are straight in the deep end in pageants. Do people just make do as they gear up, gather what they need and learn about it? Or do most people spend up in advance of their debut? Does the age you start make a difference? Like it'd be much easier to get by with less for a 2yo than a 6yo?
(totally not JB related, I am just curious!)
People don't generally have a debut, it's not like they buy the stuff and practice in secret for months and then suddenly take the pageant world by storm.
Usually, you have quite a long period of being a newbie who is just trying to learn all this stuff, and your kid isn't really winning any big titles for quite a while because you're still learning.
Eventually you know more and you have the right things and you have the experience and then you start winning. (Although of course there is occasionally the odd time when someone brand new will just win right off the bat.)
In the past (prior to lots of people owning home computers) people usually found about pageants through:
-->just happening to meet someone already involved in pageants
--> seeing a preliminary that's being held in a shopping mall and daughter being interested by what she saw and mom picks up the paperwork to take home and look at
-->going to their county fair and seeing the fair queen pageant and then finding out there are other pageants out there besides fairs and festivals
-->getting an advertisement in their mail or seeing an advertisement in the back of a teen magazine
Getting an advertisement is how I started...my daughter does pageants now because I already knew about them and enjoyed them and thought it would be fun to do with her, but back when I was a little girl in the early 90s, I saw an ad for "miss american coed" in the back of one of those teenybopper magazines I was really too little to be looking at, and it said this pageant had age groups for as young as four years old..nowadays american coed goes as young as three years old but back then it was four years old...but anyway, I was entranced by the picture of the girls wearing ball gowns and tiaras, and I begged my mom to write for the info, she did, and they sent a big folder of info with a packet of stuff along with a VHS tape. It was a natural pageant, no makeup allowed. We went to it that summer, and it was a big state pageant with like a hundred other little girls and we were just competely unprepared and overwhelmed, because we knew nothing...everything we thought would look right ended up being all wrong and the pageant was just so BIG.
But, I enjoyed it and I wanted to do it again..and we found out about other pageants through doing this one, and learned how some are natural and some are glitz and how to do each kind.
Once we started glitz we never looked back lol. We learned more and more from the people we met and before long I had all the making of a glitz girl and was doing the glitz circuit through the Midwest and some in the south.
But I will say that nowadays most moms find out about pageants through the tv shows or through the internet. Gone are the days of word of mouth and random advertising. Lol.
As for your question about whether it's easier to start as a baby or older and do you need less...Well when you are a baby, you don't need the makeup, the falls, or the flippers, so that's a few less things to need, and you don't need to know how to model yet or do talent or know how to interview, so you won't spend on a coach for modeling, or a coach for interview, and you won't be taking dance lessons or whatever you're doing for talent.
But, many coaches work with parents of babies anyway so you might still be paying for that..it's more of consultation at that age- having the coach look at your outfits and photos and things like that, really consultation not coaching.
Once you're 2 or 3, you have to start coaching, so that begins more expense. By the time you're 4, you definitely need coaching because 4-6 is the age group where it really starts to matter that you know what you're doing onstage. It's not enough anymore to just be cute, starting at 4 you have to do stuff.