Carmen Rouse was named a finalist in Miss Swimsuit UK this year – a beauty pageant where women strut down the runway in tiny bikinis.
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The 31-year-old wasn’t always comfortable in her own skin following a tough time at school.
Cruel bullies called her a “ginger minger” and mocked her for being a red-headed tomboy.
“They used to call me a sack of carrots instead of a sack of spuds,” she says. “It was awful.”
In an interview with the Daily Star, the Wales-based influencer revealed that she dyed her hair blonde one school summer holiday to shake off bullies – but it didn’t work.
“I’ve never been a very confident girl, with who I am as a person and how I look,” she says.
“I started getting into fitness first because I was quite a chubby child and I was ginger.
“Miss Swimsuit UK came along years and years later, which is only this year I was part of the finals.
“So I was petrified and I’ve obviously got in the back of my mind that ‘people are going to be targeting you, pointing out negatives about your body and that they’ll find something bad to say about your body’.”
Much to Carmen’s surprise, the environment was supportive and the girls she was competing against actually “brought her out of her shell”.
“As soon as I walked out on the stage something just switched,” she recalls. “I was just much more confident.
“And now [negative] comments don’t bother me any more.”
Carmen now has 19k followers on Instagram and says her partner’s sudden passing last year taught her that life is too short to be bothered by trolls.
She was recently the victim of relentless trolling about her appearance after appearing on a Boohoo Man online dating show.
“I went onto Boohoo Man dating show and probably just got completely targeted with over a thousand comments saying that I look like a character from SpongeBob SquarePants,” she says.
“My teeth look messed up, my face looks messed up, I’ve had too much work done.
“It was just so many horrible comments. And that did set me back because that was actually during the Miss Swimsuit journey.
“Halfway through the Miss Swimsuit journey it did knock me back a little bit and I thought ‘do I actually look this horrible in real life?’
“Luckily, my friends and all the girls came together and told me not to listen to them, they are just trolls.
“So now I’ve learnt to let it go in one ear and out the other.”