A tattooed swimsuit model with thousands of Instagram followers has revealed she had to overcome school bullies who picked on her for being "chubby" and having ginger hair before she was able to embrace the way she looks and feel confident in her own skin.

Carmen Rouse, 31, managed to land a finalist spot in Miss Swimsuit UK this year, and despite having the confidence to flaunt her body in swimwear, she wasn't always so comfortable with the way she looked.

In school, Carmen, from Wales, was horrifically bullied for being a bit of a "tomboy" and was referred to as a "sack of carrots" because of her weight combined with her red hair. The bullying was so severe that Carmen decided to completely overhaul her look, and spent one summer losing "loads of weight" and dying her hair bleach blonde.

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Speaking to the Daily Star, she said: "I started getting into fitness first because I was quite a chubby child and I was ginger. So they used to call me a sack of carrots instead of a sack of spuds ... it was awful. So I thought, you know what? I'm gonna go to the gym, I'm gonna lose loads of weight and I went bleach blonde at the time in the summer holidays. Then I went back to school as a completely new person and I still got bullied for a little bit."

Dying her hair and losing weight helped Carmen gain some self-confidence, but it wasn't until this year that she was able to fully embrace who she really was and begin rocking her red tresses once again. The realisation that she wanted to be comfortable with her natural look came after the tragic passing of her partner last year, as she realised life was too short to allow people's negative judgements to affect her mental health.

Carmen - who has over 19,000 followers on her @carmenrouse_official Instagram account - then decided to enter Miss Swimsuit UK, and has since heaped praise on the other women she was modelling alongside, as she said they helped bring her "out of her shell" and boosted her self-confidence further.

"I've never been a very confident girl, with who I am as a person and how I look," the model explained, "Miss Swimsuit UK came along years and years later, [and it was] only this year [that] I was part of the finals. So I was petrified and I've obviously got in the back of my mind that 'people are going to be targeting you, pointing out negatives about your body and that they'll find something bad to say about your body'.

"But it was the girls there that brought me out of my shell. The girls were competing but were there for each other, there were loads of different shapes and sizes, different hair colours, and personalities. Everyone had each other's backs, we pushed each other to get our confidence. So as soon as I walked out on the stage something just switched, I was just much more confident. And now [negative] comments don't bother me any more."

It hasn't all been smooth sailing for Carmen since launching her modelling career though. She was featured on a BooHoo Man online dating show and was met with a barrage of "horrible comments" that criticised her appearance and gave her newfound confidence a knock - but was able to overcome the trolls with the help of her friends.

She added: "I just got completely targeted with over a thousand comments saying that I look like a character from SpongeBob SquarePants, my teeth look messed up, my face looks messed up, I've had too much work done, etc. It was just so many horrible comments. And that did set me back because that was actually during the Miss Swimsuit journey.

"Halfway through the Miss Swimsuit journey it did knock me back a little bit and I thought 'Do I actually look this horrible in real life?'. Luckily, my friends and all the girls came together and told me not to listen to them they were just trolls. So now I've learnt to let it go in one ear and out the other."

These days, Carmen admits she does still get some negative comments from people online, but she's learnt to embrace the way she looks and no longer worries what other people think of her. She doesn't want to "hide" from her striking red locks any longer and thinks her younger self would be proud of how far she's come.

She said: "I still get called 'ginger minger' today and I've still got red hair and I'm not changing it. I went bleach blonde to hide away from the ginger but I thought, I'm a redhead at heart, it's gonna stay around. I think the younger me would probably look at me and think, 'Fair play'. I didn't see myself in this situation today, I've changed so much."

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