Lafayette teen wins title, delivers message

Olivia Raichart doesn’t look like a stereotypical pageant queen. Her dreadlocked hair cascades more than halfway down her back. She’s the girl in the photograph holding her pet chicken; she’s the girl with flowers in her hair.

With skateboarding and surfing as two of her favorite activities, the 13-year-old, who goes by Liv, likes to push herself, and boundaries. And while pageantry isn’t an extreme sport, Liv saw it as a challenge.

“I tend to do things that others might think I can’t do,” said the Lafayette teen.

“It’s hard to keep up with Liv,” said her mom, Jayme. “She’s always wanted to try everything.”

Perhaps as a function of the dyslexia diagnosis she received when she was younger, Liv said she turns everything over in her mind until she figures it out. Not being a natural at a subject like math, for example, drives her to become a better student in the subject.

Relating first-hand to how much pressure young people have on them to have an unrealistic standard of a perfect image, particularly on social media, she thought it was time to push back.

When her daughter told her mom she wanted to try a beauty pageant, Jayme admits she was “terrified.”

“I thought ‘Oh gosh, she’s going to stick out.’ I just worked through it because it doesn’t matter what I think,” Jayme said. “I give a lot of credit to her being brave and letting her kind of lead because it’s a whole new world.”

Olivia said, “I wanted to be an example of unique beauty, and I didn’t think the pageant world would accept different beauty.”

It turns out, they did. She was crowned Miss Teen Colorado in the United States of America pageant competition in June.

Now the teen wants to take her pageant platform of body positivity she calls “Fearlessly Flawed” to young people in the state. She has ideas for sharing her message with a booth at Broomfield Days and other events.

“This morning a new filter popped up on my feed to give you perfect teeth. Who has perfect teeth at 13?” she said. “That’s really why I wanted to do it. Studies on depression and suicide say it’s from social media and how my generation spends so much of our time on there. We see pictures through all these filters, it’s not real and we have these unattainable standards.”

“If there’s a filter for