I want to take a moment to appreciate the character that is Dominique Reighard from season 10.

Coming into the competition Dominique definitely had people talking. According to this unnamed contestant who we never heard of again

She wasn’t, and if she was, that’s offensive. Screw you random white girl!

Anyway, Dominique came in with a sad story that’s unfortunately all too common. Dominique was a victim of domestic abuse. Now I’m not trying to take anything away from the gravity of that situation but she had a rather odd explanation why she overcame the nasty situation she was in.

It wasn’t because she’s realised she was wiser, prouder, or even stronger. No Domnique beat domestic abuse (no pun intended) because she is…

And I don’t really get what that has to do with anything, nor if it’s necessarily true.

So after this rather odd first impression, while also clearly looking a little older, Dominique still got cast for the show. She didn’t start the competition off so well, landing in the bottom four for the first elimination.

Luckily Dom was about to get a makeover to change up her look and perhaps fortune in the competition. Unfortunately for Dom, her makeover was this:

According to her, she looked (and I quote) “really high fashion and fierce as hell”, but according to everyone else she looked 65 years old.

She then took a shot where they didn’t edit out her cellulite.

and photographer George Holz literally thought she was someone’s mother coming to pick her daughter up from set. Which is painful.

Also: side note, does George Holz know where the hell he is? Does he know what show he is on? Pick up who to go where exactly?

Anyway, despite her ending up in the bottom two, she survived over a girl that said this while holding a black Barbie doll:

Although they even blurred out her mouth so there was some profanity in that sentence. I’m guessing to add some extra pizzazz to her mid nineteenth century-style racism (the quote is Fatima reiterating what she said).

Anyway, Dominique was now not only a little hard to look at (although they did lighten her hair up a little), but she was also quite difficult to live with.

Dominique did not know how to set her alarm clock correctly and so it kept going off at random times in the middle of the night.

Even Russian-born but Hawaiian raised (which somehow made her sound like she was from another planet) Anya, thought Dominique was out of line:

Or at least that’s what I think she said.

Later, Dominique got into a fight with Claire over having a husband

With Lauren over being crazy (who doesn’t look particularly sane herself)

And with Whitney about her not understanding racism.

But by the time they went overseas to Italy, the issues with Dom seemed to have died down. And after Anya had a little taste of the pavement,

they had to do a CoverGirl commercial. Luckily for us, they even had to do it in Italian this time.

Fatima did pretty well, as her Italian was surprisingly convincing. But considering Fatima is from Somalia and Somalia used to be a colony of Italy, the language is still around there, and she might have heard Italian before.

Dominique clearly had not had any contact with any other foreign language before. This wasn’t going to help her.

Seemingly in the middle of the process of her destroying the Italian language, Dominique saw a word she recognized! And perhaps languages aren’t her thing, but maybe Geography is! What’s the capital of Brazil Dominique?

Exactly!

That GIF doesn’t really do it justice without audio though.

What I liked about Dominique in this case is that Dominique knew that her CoverGirl commercial was a terrible failure, and she even admitted to trying to distract the judges beforehand:

But maybe she knew she was never in true danger of going home. Because Lauren ended her commercial like this:

And Whitney stopped in the middle of a sentence to notice the bar guy had his D out, and she was very impressed with it.

It really looks exactly like that? Why the hell is she looking down?

So Dom probably knew she’d be alright.

Dominique’s final episode came just before the final, where she produced this shot.

Serving you butch queen.

But at least we got to see Dominique again, a few seasons laters for All Stars. Unfortunately she didn’t seem half as crazy as she was on Season 10.

Moreover she didn’t make it into the infamous Modelland episode, in which the girls had to act out scenes from Tyra’s book Modelland. This is one of them:

I totally own that book by the way, and I promise you more on that trainwreck in a later entry.