Suddenly, there they are. A clutch of black Miss Africa Souths, grinning alongside their white counterparts in a picture spread, in a frothy re-authoring of history.
At the Sun City Superbowl last weekend, when surprise winner Tansey Coetzee gasped as the tiara was slipped on to her head, her victory marked 50 years of one of the strangest beauty pageants in the world.
Even though it makes no sense numerically, there have been at least 53 white winners. Indeed, there was also Rozette Motsepe in a heavy-duty Afro, Pearl Jansen, Cynthia Claasen, Ellen Peters and a few others, but who knew?
The Miss South Africa contest and the Miss Africa South contest would be best deconstructed by a foreign writer like Louis Theroux, who travels the world in search of the bizarre.
They were entirely separate, just like the entrances at apartheid post offices, run in different sections of divided newspapers. Yet ask any black person aged around 25 up, and they remember only Anneline Kriel and the yearly double-page line-up of white babes in bikinis.
While white South Africa ruled - for nearly 40 years of the pageant - it was a smouldering assault of lissome blonde upon blonde. For a while, there were even two white winners every year as rival newspapers tussled over the title, the winners all curiously clone-like in high-cut bathing suits and curls courtesy of hot rollers.
A fascinating by-product of democracy is that it seems to protect those who rather like living in the past, so they are allowed to be deftly economical with the truth.
Yet the irony of this year's low-key celebration of 50 years is the truth: every single woman who won the contest, right up to ill-fated Diana Tilden-Davis in 1991, was chosen specifically to represent a white nation.
But last Saturday night, as the audience in the Superbowl squealed and ululated when their favourites glided into view in a restaging of the same old pageant we've seen many times before, the irony was utterly taboo. Everyone pretended that no one quite knew the reasons why 1985 winner Andrea Stelzer - like four others - was not able to compete at international contests.
It was mentioned in passing, and Stelzer - as pretty as ever - walked on to the stage with the requisite rented arm candy, as if she was the brazen survivor of a 20-year-old, iniquitous onslaught on her chances at global fame.
What would it have hurt to use the occasion of a 50-year anniversary not only to rightly honour the noble designers Elzbieta Rosenwerth, Peter Soldatos, Errol Arendz and Marianne Fassler, but also to tell the truth? When Stelzer won, a state of emergency held sway. People were disappearing and being tortured. The townships were under siege. The rest of the world had had enough, so the global community isolated the apartheid state, and Stelzer, like the women before her, was barred from outside competitions.
Instead, the organisers last Saturday willingly went along with a 40-year negation of black South African beauty. This cast into dazzling relief the courage of the first winner who was not white, Amy Kleinhans in 1992, to insist she was black and not coloured. A sigh of relief marked the appearance on stage of pageant winners from Kleinhans onwards because there were only two blondes - Heather Hamilton (1999) and Claudia Henkel (2004).
Thuli Sithole, who won the contest in 2005, is unsure if the public is interested in the pageant anymore, particularly as its generally low-key entertainment struggles to compete with the fever that a reality show like Idols can engender.
She quietly wonders: "Is it the fact that it was once on M-Net, and that seemed to hype the pageant as a thing of glamour more than it does on the SABC?"
Sithole is convinced that an era is over, and the ultimate understanding of South African beauty belongs to the golden generation of Kleinhans, Jacqui Mofokeng (1993), Basetsane Makgalemele (1994), Bernelee Daniell (1995), Peggy-Sue Khumalo (1996) and Kerishnie Naicker (1997). Sithole calls them "the Nelson Mandela transition girls" and believes their reigns were marked not by standard beauty queen hospital trips and sod-turnings, but by extraordinary events.
"There were lots of things happening to support them. They won at a time when there was favourable politics in the country; they could be very chilled out about the whole thing."
Yet for some of the black former Miss South Africas, returning to Sun City to be gazed at, gawked at and giggled at was not an option. Mofokeng and Khumalo were conspicuous by their absence.
"Peggy Sue took time off afterwards. She was inspired by the whole thing to go and study overseas," says Sithole. "I really looked up to her and admired her."
Once Vanessa Carreira and Cindy Nell were winning in 2001 and 2002, politics had crept into the corridors behind the Superbowl, where lines of girls gather for the same old hot curlers and a mascara marathon before the show.
The ANC Youth League looked like it would become a perennial Mother Grundy, moaning about the pageant's abiding whiteness, but the inarticulately political message in their diatribes was clear: the days of a white woman in the sash were surely numbered.
But even they grew bored, and by the time Henkel won three years ago, the steam was off.
"For me," says Henkel, who is completing a law degree, "the inspiration was Heather Hamilton. I felt that if a tall blonde girl could win, I could win.
"So we all have our ways of looking at it, from our own cultural perspective. But really, my belief is that a Miss South Africa of today has to have one primary quality, and that is versatility. To face political questions, to work out there in the world, you have to be able to fit in with anything."
Sithole - who completed her degree in town and regional planning this year - says that, strange as it may sound, the political invective is missed.
"Let's face it, it kept things interesting. It got people debating about Miss South Africa instead of forgetting all about the whole pageant. It feels like the contest would again have to be criticised for something in order to bring back the interest in it."
Former Miss South Africa Sonia Raciti-Oshry, who organised and lead the judging panel this year, is content the pageant has finally become apolitical, even on the international stage.
"When I won (in 1998), there was a very strong focus on beauty with a purpose. This year, we advised judges that the criteria for Miss Universe were the same as that we should apply here. So we deliberately went out looking for a beautiful modern woman, who is sexy and charming and elegant. We put that into the mind of all the judges as a goal, and I think we really got that in Tansey."
It seemed as if Raciti-Oshry inadvertently admitted that beauty had now eclipsed purpose, yet she insisted that Miss South Africas "must be a good rôle model who can relate to people. We may not have the big hair and ballgowns of 30 years ago, but the values remain the same".
"I think it would be fair to say one can now truly feel the winner is simply the top girl, and that is such a positive thing, for the country to have moved on.
"In my case, I had come from such a humble background and I was not expecting anything of that at all. Now I can see that Miss South Africa is always going to be someone who is meant to go that route, to take that path and find a purpose."
Coetzee, says Raciti-Oshry, "most definitely had something that put her ahead, like a little light-bulb above her - and it's always like that with the winner because the judges want something unusual".
She laughs at the thought of judging only 12 white girls.
"Thank goodness we've now got that continual sense of growth.
"After 15 years, real South African beauty is coming through. In the old days, all the contestants had lived more or less the same experience: white and in the suburbs. Now, they come from everywhere.
"It's so much more interesting."