Battle of the Three Turkish Beauties and the Swimsuit King

Swimsuit King goes down!

Anyone who knows anything about women's designer swimwear is familiar with the Zeki Triko brand -- whose retail bathing suit prices make us blanch. The Turkish company's founder/owner, Zeki Başeskioğlu is internationally famous, his bathing suits routinely show up in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, and he has boosted the careers of any number of world-class super-models including Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, and Eva Herzigova.

Now in his 70's, Zeki has been cast by some in the media as a 'professor of beauty' -- and the other day he let it go to his head. In an interview for Hafta Sonu Dergisi (one of Turkey's largest selling weekly magazines), he said that 3 of Turkey's most beautiful and popular female mega-stars were over the hill and too fat to wear his bikini bathing suits anymore. And he named names...Hé»®ya Avşar, Gé»®ben Ergen and Sibel Can. Ouch! You can't get any bigger than that.

"To wear a bikini well you need to be tall, elegant -- and to have beautiful, upstanding breasts," he said. As for Hé»®ya, Gé»®ben and Sibel, well... the professor advised, "The bikini age for those 3 is past. They've all become too fat. Because of that, they each need to switch out of bikinis and into one piece suits -- which are much more appropriate for them."

Rumors of volcano eruptions in the camps of the 3 beauties surfaced immediately in the Turkish press, but five days passed before just one of the ladies offered up a public riposte to the Zeki Bey insult. And it was a zinger. Asked by a H黵riyet Gazetesi reporter about her opinion of 'Professor' Zeki's remark, G黮ben Ergen said, "I really can't say -- because I don't wear (cheap) locally-made bikinis like his." You could almost hear the cheers from the other two beauties as 'the Professor' sank below the surface, in flames.

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