AN inspirational little girl who lost all her hair and her eyebrows due to alopecia has won a modelling contract with a top agency.

The bright and sunny personality of five-year-old Sydney Caraher, from Upton, shone through to judges of a Model Tots competition at the Pyramids Shopping Centre in Birkenhead, and she won first place in the age four to five category.

The contract is with leading agency Frame which also casts children in roles for film and TV.

Sydney's mum Sarah Caraher hopes the contract will help raise awareness of alopecia in children.

She said: "We're just so immensely proud of her and how she has coped with everything.

"Winning this competition is great as it goes against the stereotypes of what is seen as ‘normal’ and proves that you can still be pretty if you look a bit different.

"It's given Sydney such a huge confidence boost too and just reading out all the nice comments people have made has been good for her.

"When it first happened she lost her identity really so it has taken her a while to find herself again."

Alopecia, a form of hair loss often caused by stress, affects around one in a thousand people, including children.

Sydney and mum Sarah, who works as a sales assistant at Sainsbury's in Upton, and dad Dave, 35, an electrician, are regular shoppers at the Pyramids and spotted the advertisement for the model competition one Saturday afternoon.

Sarah, aged 29, said: "It was free to enter and have her picture taken and we hadn't had any proper photos done for a long time so we just decided to do it on a whim really.

“We didn’t expect much but thought we’d have some nice prints at the end of it so winning has been a big surprise.”

Once photographed, the tots' images were circulated on social media and the ones that gathered the most ‘likes’ went through to the judging panel.

Kai James Keenan won the under one’s group and Arminio-Joseph McKinney, winner of the age one to three section.

Derek Millar, manager at the Pyramids Shopping Centre said: "All our winners are fantastic and everyone at Pyramids shopping centre would like to congratulate their families.

"Sydney might look unusual compared to other children, but her beauty really shines through, not just in her photographs but in her personality too.

"She is a brave and inspirational little girl to not let her condition stop her, and we are proud to have been able to help by awarding her this prize."

Sydney, who attends Overchurch Infants School, first started losing her hair at the age of two.

She had managed to get a bit of a pen stuck up her nose as toddlers tend to, and had to have it removed in A&E.

Doctors believe the stress of this triggered her first bout of alopecia, which left her with a bald patch that took almost a year to re-grow.

Then, when she turned three, her parents decided to try and part her with her dummy as her teeth had started to grow and again, her body reacted to the stress by rejecting her hair – this time the eyebrows and eyelashes.

By the time Sydney was four and needed grommets to improve her hearing, Sarah and Dave, aged 35, suspected the operation might trigger the same reaction in their little girl, but were not prepared for the extent of it.

Over a period of four months Sydney’s hair continued to come out leaving her eventually with so little that for a while she thought she was turning in to a boy.

Sarah said: "She went through a stage of saying she was a boy now. She was so young and just didn’t understand so we went along with it.

"You just have to support your child and if saying that was what made her feel comfortable then you can’t take that away from her.

"However, when Frozen came out she quickly changed her mind and wanted to be a princess again!"