Cassandra heard the words calmly, nodded once, and thanked everyone in the room before walking out. The fourth round of the Victoria’s Secret model search had just ended, and the competition’s most unsettling truth was now impossible to ignore: the group that had been laughing together, practicing walks in hallways, and calling each other’s moms on FaceTime was shrinking fast. Three women went home in a single day, and the ones who remained had to figure out how to keep wanting it for each other while competing against each other at the same time.
Hair, makeup, and the weight of wings
The day opened with transformation as its theme, and the names attached to it were not small. Pat McGrath and Guido handled hair and makeup for the group, a fact that landed differently on the women in the chairs than it might elsewhere. ‘We show up and we see Pat and Guido there and we’re like, oh my god, this is the big leagues, this is real stuff,’ one of the contestants said, still processing it. McGrath’s team worked carefully on skin tones and eye depth, with specific attention to getting the eye shapes fuller rather than smaller, adjusting shimmer depth, and lifting brows with precision. One contestant noted quietly that people in the industry often complain about artists not knowing how to do Black women’s makeup, and that the experience felt, in her words, like being seen.
Guido added length to Arya’s natural curls, acknowledging the way curl shrinkage fights volume without length. For Keani, he trimmed a couple of inches and added face-framing layers, then spent part of the session gently pushing back against her habit of apologizing mid-sentence. ‘No more I’m sorry,’ he told her directly. ‘Sorry is not in your vocabulary anymore.’
At the end of the glamour session, the women walked in practice wings. Nobody was told in advance. The wings were heavy, wide, and theatrical, and the point was exactly that: could they roll with something they had not prepared for and still own the room? For several of the women, something shifted. ‘I was like, I like it. God damn it, I love it,’ one of them said, still wearing the wings and not entirely sure what to do with the feeling.
One chance, one runway, one person going through
The backstory filling the edges of the day belonged to a contestant from Maine who had quit her only job to be there. She is the oldest of six siblings, had been helping cover a nearly $2,000 monthly rent since her family arrived from Cameroon, and made sure her two brothers had phones and the younger kids had a tablet at home. The email requesting time off for the competition was denied. She quit anyway. ‘I am taking a really, really big risk by doing this,’ she said, and then kept practicing her walk alone in the hallway.
By the end of deliberations, Tatiana, Andreina, and Arya had earned unanimous praise as standouts. The judging team described Tatiana’s runway turn as a ‘legendary face snatch.’ Arya’s decision to wear a full-glam wig surprised everyone in the room, including the people who styled it. Riley and a contestant named Kalin were debated carefully, their walks weighed against their presence and potential.
Cassandra was released first, told warmly that her journey here was not going to move forward. Keani followed, told she was on the radar but would not be walking the show this year. Mara came last, her walk judged to have genuinely improved but not quickly enough for a runway two months away. ‘I don’t think it closed,’ Mara said of the door on her way out. ‘I think it just showed us what we’re capable of.’
The woman still wearing the wings when the hallway cleared
One contestant, still in full glam after the elimination announcements, looked at the camera on a phone and said she was taking a photo of herself because she was never going to look this pretty again.
Five women are left. The next cut goes to three.
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