“Pretty girls to brighten the pages”: That’s how the Toronto Sun introduced its then brand new and risqué Sunshine Girls feature to the public on Nov. 1, 1971.
Over a half century later, the tabloid’s long-running series that invites women to pose for sultry photographs lives on in a zombie form in the Sun’s print edition and on its website, which have been rerunning old photos for the past five years — in some cases, 10 times per model.
The Toronto Sun’s downtown photo studio shuttered during the COVID-19 pandemic and hasn’t reopened.
To make up for the lack of new images, the Toronto Sun has been reusing old photographs of previous Sunshine Girls — primarily from shoots between 2017 and 2019 — for its daily newspaper spreads and online posts. Many are also republished in photo galleries that are frequently reshared by the Sun’s social media accounts.
Former Sunshine Girls and critics of the column are questioning the ethics of this repetitive practice, arguing the out-of-date photos and their captions don’t represent who those women are today.
Many Toronto Sun models have gone on to become teachers, real estate agents and public sector workers, and some wish their old pictures would stop returning to the limelight without renewed permission.
Some Toronto Sun readers, meanwhile, are complaining in the newspaper’s comments section about the “recycled” photoshoots.
Former Sunshine Girls call the repeat photos ‘distasteful’
Cephra Hasfal posed as a Sunshine Girl in June 2019 when she was 24 years old and competing in Miss Universe Canada. She hoped the experience would help promote her image.
“Back then, it was kind of like a bucket list moment,” she told TorontoToday. “When I was doing the pageant, they were telling us to go out and do things. It was just a different time.”
Now 30 and working as a real estate agent in Windsor, Hasfal’s photos from six years ago have rerun numerous times since the pandemic. At the time of the photoshoot, she was under the impression her pictures would only be published once.
But as of May 4, 2025, Hasfal’s long-ago pose for the camera was still getting screentime on the main page of Toronto Sun’s website.
“People change,” she said. “It’s weird, and a little bit awkward, to see those photos resurfaced when I’m doing something more professional and in a straightforward field.”
“I’ll get calls from my family or a friend who’s still in Toronto, and they’ll say: ‘You did this?’ I honestly had no idea they were still running those,” she added.
Karlye, a former cosmetologist who participated in February 2019, called it “annoying having the posts repeat.”
Without any notification from the Toronto Sun, her photos have been republished online at least six times between April 2023 and April 2025.
The caption beneath these pictures reports that Karlye dreams of working in beauty or film and loves listening to indie music, “with Lana Del Rey on the top of her playlist.”
Currently working for a Toronto non-profit, Karlye confirmed she hasn’t aspired to work in the beauty industry for quite some time. The former Sunshine Girl also doesn’t listen to Lana Del Rey anymore.
“It’s distasteful,” she said. “I’m sure a lot of women don’t want the repeat photos. In my situation, they’re not awful photos, but it’s a little strange to still be advertised as a Sunshine Girl even though that was six years ago.”
TorontoToday asked the Toronto Sun’s parent company Postmedia whether it intends to reopen its photo studio to capture new Sunshine Girl photos in the future, or, if not, how long the newspaper plans to publish the photos of the same group of women who were photographed before the studio was shut down.
The company did not provide a response to those questions, or to others about why it doesn’t reach out to its former models in advance of republishing their photos in the newspaper or online.
The inescapable Sunshine Girl
A major piece of the newspaper’s identity, the Sunshine Girl program has featured thousands of women from the Greater Toronto Area and beyond. Some have used the photos to boost their resume when seeking employment in the fashion and entertainment industries.
The Toronto Sun’s Sunshine Girl column has continually faced criticism over the years for objectifying women, but it has made an undeniable impression in the local media landscape.
“Even people who refuse to read Sun tabloids have heard of the Sunshine Girl,” noted a Globe and Mail columnist in 2000.
The series was so popular it had a thriving print calendar for years, and the brand even extended to a “Sunshine Boy” spinoff until the early 2000s.
Several women who posed for the newspaper in the past told TorontoToday they were happy with their experiences, including Theresa Longo, who participated in nearly 40 shoots.
Longo said she has requested the newspaper to rerun certain photos of her like a throwback Christmas shoot or an old swimsuit edition.
The Toronto series followed in the footsteps of the “Page 3” column in the Rupert Murdoch-owned U.K. tabloid The Sun, which began publishing topless photos of women in 1970.
The Toronto Sun’s series never published topless photos, maintaining a more PG13 aesthetic, and has now outlived its British equivalent by more than a decade. The Murdoch-run paper abandoned Page 3 in 2015.
The ‘death rattle’ of tabloid news, says one critic
Media critic Jan Wong questioned the morals of the Sunshine Girl series well before the turn of the 21st century: “It’s so 1970s,” she said.
Pointing to the financial struggles and job cuts at Postmedia, which acquired the Sun newspaper chain in 2015, Wong claimed the column’s current output reflects the company’s broader issues.
“It’s sad the media has collapsed to such a pathetic level that they have to dredge up old Sunshine Girls,” she told TorontoToday.
“It really wreaks of desperation — the death rattle of the tabloid newspaper.”
Postmedia, a conglomerate that is largely owned by a U.S. hedge fund, undertook a flurry of media deals over the past 10 years that resulted in the closure of dozens of local newspapers, hundreds of journalist layoffs and the increasing syndication of content across its chain.
Wong doesn’t believe the Toronto Sun’s closure of its photo studio justifies what she called a “pathetic” attempt to hang onto a “repetitive” column that’s already considered by many to be outdated.
She alleged Postmedia could afford to revive the series to its formerly functioning state if it really wanted to, but senses the network would rather save a buck and continue its reruns.
“With an iPhone, you can take a pretty decent picture,” Wong said. “I just think they don’t want to spend any more money. They don’t have a studio anymore, which shows the decline and fallout of newspapers.”
Newspaper not shy about playing the hits
The Toronto Sun is not hiding the fact it's reusing old photographs.
Recurring copy that runs alongside women’s photographs in the print edition states: “Until our photo studio opens again, we’ll be publishing some of your favourite SUNshine Girls. If there’s a memorable gal you’d love to see more of, drop us a line.”
An analysis of the Toronto Sun’s website reveals just how frequently some women’s photos are being republished.
A woman named Elisha who posed in March 2018 was the subject of new feature Sunshine Girl web posts at least ten times since the beginning of 2023 — including four times already this year.
The newspaper put minimal effort into differentiating each of these posts.
In some cases, it switched up which photo of Elisha it featured, but it often did not. The same photo of Elisha wearing a striped black and white top was utilized as the main image for four of the five most recent posts about her.
Most information about Elisha in the copy is repeated nearly verbatim from post to post, such as the fact she is a “5-foot-5 Virgo,” while some of her other personal factoids recur with small editorial tweaks.
For instance, in February 2024, the Sun noted Elisha “wanted to be a nurse so she can help others who can’t help themselves.” A year earlier, it said she “has a love of modelling and would one day want to work in the nursing field to help others who can’t help themselves.”
In some rerun posts, the newspaper claims its models are “back again by popular demand.” Postmedia did not respond to TorontoToday’s question about how that demand is determined.
Toronto Sun readers are aware of the reruns and occasionally complain in the comments section.
“Too bad you recycle shoots too often,” one commenter wrote on a Sunshine Girl video compilation published on the Toronto Sun’s YouTube page. The video ranked the women who were republished in March based on the level of clicks.
“I do wonder if these women realized that their pictures would be reused for a decade when they first posed,” mused a reader in a comment from last year.
“Every appearance is a new record” and “Would prefer to see her now, not six years ago” read other comments left underneath recent galleries.
Winnipeg Sun ended Sunshine Girl series last year
Weeks after Postmedia’s sale of the Winnipeg Sun to Klein Media closed last year, the new owner announced it would end the Sunshine Girl column in its newspaper, in part because it had been rife with repeated photos.
“For several years, the Sunshine Girl feature had been maintained using photographs from years gone by, as we ceased taking new pictures,” owner Kevin Klein, a former Manitoba Conservative MLA, explained to his audience.
“This practice not only dated the content but also signalled a disconnect with the current needs and expectations of our audience,” he continued. “The elimination of the Sunshine Girl feature is a positive step towards modernizing our content.”
Klein said the media landscape has changed drastically since the Sunshine Girls series was first introduced and the column now stands “at odds with the values we strive to uphold as a trusted news source.”
In place of Sunshine Girls, Klein Media said it planned to introduce a new feature that recognized exceptional volunteers in Manitoba by sharing their inspiring stories.