LIKE all good models, Helen Lawal comes prepared. Her hair and skin are shower-fresh and she has her own supply of accessories. There is a laundry-size holdall of shoes and a small plastic bag crammed with jewellery. She tips this bag on to the table and picks out some long ivory-like earrings which look perfect with the first dress to model.

Before the camera, Helen is a natural. She is statuesque: 5ft 11, and a size 10-12, she has great poise and a perfect smile. She instinctively turns to give the photographer what he needs. She is polite, charming and focused.

Anyone would think she’d been doing this for years. But it’s all new to Helen, the 23-year-old student at Hull York Medical School who has taken the beauty world by storm.

Last December, she was crowned Miss Black Britain. This month, she took the Miss York title. Next stop are the Miss England finals in July.

Helen only took up modelling last Easter to earn some extra cash to boost her student income and entered Miss Black Britain to spice up her life.

“I was living in Grimsby while I attended a placement at the hospital and I felt like I needed some excitement and a new challenge,” said Helen, who was born in Nigeria but grew up in Pickering.

She says she was shocked to win Miss Black Britain, a national title that brought with it a modelling contract and lots of media coverage. But she was even more blown-away to win Miss York. “I was really surprised,” she said. “There were so many pretty girls in the final eight.”

Helen said winning Miss York meant a lot, particularly considering her mixed-race heritage and that her friend Laura Ehima, another Nigerian girl who grew up in Pickering, came runner-up.

“For both me and Laura to be picked, I was really, really pleased,” says Helen.

Her coronation has sparked controversy, however, with a complaint to the organiser of Miss York about a black person winning the title. Police are now investigating the caller to see if a hate crime has been committed.

To her immense credit, Helen has shown great dignity and taken the row in her stride. “I consider myself to be Yorkshire, but from Nigeria because I was born there. Over there, I am recognised as being white, so it is nice to be recognised over here as being of colour.”

Helen hopes her success in beauty pageants and modelling will encourage other young black girls to enter the industry.

“People have criticised Miss Black Britain as being a racist competition, saying there isn’t a Miss White Britain. But that upsets me as they haven’t grasped the concept. Black models are under-represented. I went to London fashion week, and for every 20 girls only one was black. That is just not representative of England.

“The whole point of the competition is to give us equal opportunity. There doesn’t need to be a Miss White Britain because most of the people who enter and are chosen are white.”

The former pupil at Lady Lumley’s, where she was an athletics champ, is thoroughly enjoying her spell in the limelight, but won’t allow it to distract from her ambition. Becoming a doctor has always been her dream. Her father, Mustapha, is a surgeon at a hospital in Benin, Nigeria, while mum Sue, from Scarborough, is a nurse. Helen lived in Nigeria until she was five, when she moved to Pickering with her mum and brother, Dave, to live with her grandma, Betty Swales. She travels back to Nigeria every year to visit her father.

“I grew up in a medical environment,” said Helen. “When dad used to do the ward rounds I would beg him to take me with him.”

Helen says some friends and colleagues can’t understand why she wants to mix modelling with medicine. “They don’t seem to recognise that it is possible to do both or how anybody can fuse the two together.”

If anything, Helen’s medical ambitions are helping her modelling career. “The modelling world seems to get me. They see me as having more depth. If I was into sports or arts or music, then the medics wouldn’t have the same view.

“A lot of girls in Miss Black Britain and Miss York were students. There has been an influx of students and that is good.”

While Helen has no qualms about modelling as a career in its own right, she thinks it is great for young women to get a decent education too. In that respect, she hopes to be a good role model.

“It shows them that it is important to have something else rather than just have the aspiration to be a model or a celebrity or a TV presenter. It is good to have another focus.”

On graduating, Helen would like to specialise in psychiatry, or sport exercise medicine which marries her two main interests of health and fitness.

“There is way too much emphasis on weight and, as a future doctor, it scares me to think of the message the media is giving out, especially to young girls,” she says.

“For me it’s more important to eat healthily and exercise regularly and those are the very reasons I eat my five a day and go to the gym. If I get the chance, I’d love to work to eradicate the notion that to be beautiful you have to stop eating.”