1.The event returns to California after a 31-year absence: L.A is the site of the beauty contest.
2.Thailand’s entrant Passaraporn Chaimongkol captures Miss Photogenic award (a feat never before accomplished by a Thai lady), becoming the third Asian female to win that title.
3.Norway claims MU title! After finishing first in the preliminaries with a total of 8.683 points (followed by Miss Venezuela with 8.420 and Miss Mexico with 8.317), Mona Grundt is elected MU by a panel of 10 telecast judges, in front of Carole Gist from America and Lissethe Mahecha of Colombia. At Los Angeles ’90, she was known as “The Beauty Queen from Hell”. Since then Scandinavia served up one of the greatest comeback stories at Miss Universe as Grundt won the title. She is a native of Hell, Norway (“the World’s Most Nearly Perfect Nation”).
4.Mexico, considered by many the greatest country to have never won a MU title, reaches its third successive MU finals.
5.Michigan-born Carole Gist becomes the first African-American female to hold the title Miss USA, gaining the right to represent her nation at MU. In the universal tournament, on California soil, she is first runner-up to Mona Grundt.
6.The USSR enters MU race! The Soviet Union makes its long-awaited international debut in Los Angeles (CA). This is a key moment for the pageant. It was as if the Cold War were being played between the Soviet Union’s Evia Stalbovska – a nurse from the Soviet Republic of Latvia– and the United States’ Carole Gist. During the fashion-challenged Communist era, the governments from Soviet Bloc countries decline to participate in Miss Universe, although Yugoslavia and Poland competed during some years; it is a little-known chapter of Miss Universe history.
7.By 1990, the South American republic of Venezuela becomes the only country in the Spanish-speaking World to reach the Miss Universe semifinals for seventh time in a row (1983-).
8.Czechoslovakia has only competed once in MU in 1970, when the former Communist country sent a fair-haired girl , Kristina Hanazalova, to Florida, (reaching the semifinals). Twenty years later, however, the New York-size country is back on the road, qualifying for the second round with Jana Hronkova. She got the first opportunity to compete internationally at the 1989 Miss World in Hong Kong.
9. Urania Haltenhoff of Chile, of Greek and German descent, makes the semis and then finals, placing in sixth. Following Haltenhoff’s big performance, however, Chile subsequently entered a period of decline.
10. High-profile Hollywood figure Haig S. Ngor becomes one of the judges. The Academy Award-winning Cambodian-born actor was a Khmer Rouge death camp survivor during Pol Pot’s reign of terror in Cambodia (1975-1979), where were slaughtered more than two million Cambodians.
11.Turkey’s national delegate Julide Ates places tenth, among 71 entries from over 58 independent countries; the highest finish ever for any Turkish.