24-year-old doctor Idil Bilgen – daughter of Turkey’s ambassador to Kyiv, Mustafa Levent Bilgen – was crowned Miss Turkey 2024 on September 11, which means she will represent her country in the international Miss World beauty pageant.

However, Bilgen’s crowning has sparked a flurry of backlash due to her…unusual beauty – with many social media users commenting that she is “not pretty enough to be Turkey’s beauty queen”, even saying that she “looks like a man”.

Several also mentioned that she won pageants only because of her father’s status.

For the past week, Bilgen had disabled comments on her social media accounts. But she finally responded to the criticism during a television appearance.

“At a time when our country is experiencing tragedies like violence against women and children, I attribute the negative comments to the fact that people have nothing better to do,” he said.

“They are people who express their opinion without really knowing anything. I don’t care about their comments,” said the 24-year-old crowned.

Bilgen – an appointed doctor – stated that she was indifferent to the criticism of the beauty pageant and stressed that “the understanding of beauty is not only physical but also a holistic concept”.

For his part, the president of the Miss Turkey pageants, Can Sandıkçı, clarified in response to the comments: “In the pageant, the well-equipped state of the person is taken into account before beauty.