-urges women to be confident, pursue pageantry
EXUDING confidence, beauty, and charm, Miss Cosmo Guyana 2025 Kayla King returned home after successfully representing her country on the international stage.
Miss Cosmo is a new international beauty pageant and festival in Vietnam and was first held in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) in 2024. Miss Cosmo was established with the aim to realise the aspirations of global women.
Last year, under the theme: Rising Dragon, inspired by the dragon, a symbol of strength, authority, and prosperity, the 2025 Miss Cosmo unveiled a new vision, a platform where women shine on stage but assert their prowess and influence in a new era.
Guyana’s representative on this stage was Kayla King, a passionate 23-year-old who hails from Parika in Region Three. She has a diploma in psychology and has intentions of furthering her studies in that field.
King already sees herself becoming a successful psychologist who helps Guyanese to take more control of mental health, a disregarded topic she feels is rampant locally, and hopes to be more than a pageant girl, but a mentor helping others to excel in that area.
As someone who was diagnosed with autism, King said her experiences in pageantry have provided her with the ability to command a room when she speaks, or speaking publicly in general.
Noting that this is an area she struggled with before pursuing pageantry, she shared that it is something she does a lot better now.
King has been participating in pageants consecutively since 2021. The Miss Cosmo pageant is one that she followed, supporting the first Miss Cosmo Guyana (2024) Misha Caleb.
“Through just trying to support her, I think I really saw the value in the Miss Cosmo organisation’s production, their mission, and what they stood for. I had an inkling, or more of an epiphany, telling me that this is something that I should do. It’s something that I wanted to be a part of. I just did not know it was going to be this soon,” King expressed.
Determined to prove to herself and to others that she is more than capable of winning, she competed and was crowned Miss Cosmo Guyana 2025, an opportunity she described as one of the greatest honours of her life. She was proud to represent Guyana on the international stage.
The Miss Cosmo Guyana winner said she is passionate about pageantry and is very patriotic. A full circle moment for her was when many told her that her representation taught them about Guyana, she said before describing pageantry as a tourism product that allows delegates to represent their homeland.
“I was probably called Kayla King once or twice for the entire three-week duration. I was always referred to as Guyana or Miss Guyana, and I think that is such an amazing thing and a great honour to carry an entire country and our culture on your back,” she expressed.
She went on to say, “I think the Guyanese people did a phenomenal job at being supportive, showing me that I am supported, but with such support comes a lot of pressure, and me, I’m just one person. So, knowing that there are so many people who are depending on me to represent them on the international stage, I think for me that created, in some cases, a lot of self-doubt, a lot of worry, but at the end of the day, it is that same support from the Guyanese people that also allowed me to take a step back and have a little bit more faith in my abilities and what essentially allowed me to perform to the best of my abilities.”
Apart from modeling and her desire to step into the field of psychology, King owns a project management and marketing business called Bluemoon Management. The daily operations of this include content creation and social media management. Bluemoon is also a modeling agency, which provides promotional work for different companies, and it additionally focuses on campaign creation.
King while speaking with this publication encouraged young women to be confident and pursue pageantry.
“Pageantry for a long time had been made for the purpose of women being seen as attractive or graceful in the eye of the male gaze, but I think that today we’ve been able to turn that around so much. Pageantry is now something that transforms the lives of women and gives them a platform to show that they’re more than just a pretty face. They’re also women of substance who have so much to offer society,” King said.
