Pageant Mom Defends Making Daughters Wear Fake Teeth Amid Backlash

Lauren Soderlund is facing backlash online — and she’s not backing down.

Lauren’s daughters, Charli, 6, and Lacie Lou, 4, both compete in pageants and wear removable dental flippers to mask missing baby teeth onstage — a common practice she says isn’t required, but does boost their odds.

“You’re not going to get the results of winning that you want without it, especially if the kids are missing teeth,” Soderlund told People in an interview published on Sunday, July 5.

Charli, she noted, “is missing five teeth, so the flipper definitely is necessary.”

Soderlund, 31, also joked about her own first impression of the flippers.

“When you put it in the first time, I’m like, ‘They look like the Whos from [Dr. Seuss’] Whoville,” she said, adding that roughly 95 percent of pageant kids at the national level wear them.

She has built a following on social media documenting her daughters’ pageant journeys, but not every viewer is a fan.

“This should not be allowed,” one critic wrote about a video she shared on TikTok featuring the girls’ behind-the-scenes antics.

Another commenter, writing in Spanish, questioned why pageants aren’t banned and said children should be allowed to just be kids.

A third took aim at the girls’ polished appearance, writing, “no bc why does she look like an American Girl doll?”

Long before the online backlash, Soderlund found a creative way to fund her daughters’ pageant careers: sewing their competition looks herself. That effort blossomed into a business, Dollhouse Designs, which has since dressed other young stars, including Scarlett Spears, 9, who plays Young Glinda in Wicked: For Good.

Soderlund outfitted Spears in one of her gowns for the film’s New York City premiere and for the Toy Story 5 premiere, where Spears posed alongside Taylor Swift.

Despite the criticism, Soderlund isn’t fazed.

“[Pageantry] teaches them how to speak to adult strangers that they don’t know,” she said. “These kids are amazing. They have accomplished so much more in their few years on this Earth than I have ever done in my 31.”