Miss Universe GB to champion preventative healthcare

The Miss Universe Great Britain winner hopes to use her year‑long reign to promote women's empowerment and preventative healthcare, drawing on the community support she grew up with on the Isle of Man.

Angela Aumonier, who is now based in London, was recently crowned and described it as a something she had been "dreaming of since I was a child".

The 25-year-old will travel to India, Uganda and the Philippines to deliver charity funds raised by contestants and give educational talks highlighting her Filipino heritage and experiences of personal loss.

She said she hoped "to amplify what I stand for in health and preventative healthcare to an even wider audience".

Her advocacy work for the charity called A-Sisterhood was rooted in personal experience, she explained, after losing her aunt to ovarian cancer in 2015 and after struggling with "my own health challenges".

"I have seen how easily those early symptoms can be missed, especially historically for women," she said.

Aumonier's day job is working in a preventative health clinic.

In her aunt's honour she founded Marsha's Hope, a healthcare charity for underserved communities, particularly those from the Philippines where her aunt, and mother, were born.

She said: "We offered free operations, free cyst removals, checkups, medications."

Aumonier said the humanitarian side of the role was central to her passion for pageantry.

"That is the big part of Miss Universe. It's about standing up and making a difference for women because of the imbalance that we see," she continued.

She will also travel to Puerto Rico in November to compete in the international Miss Universe competition, representing Great Britain.

In preparation she said the following months would be "even more physically and mentally intense".

She described taking part in pageants akin to sport.

She said: "I grew up in the Isle of Man being very, very sporty. I was in the island netball team, I was in the island athletics team and whether people like to think it or not, I look at pageantry as a sport.

It required discipline "mentally, physically, emotionally… you have to be trained in every part of those aspects", she added.

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