While searching through a rack of colorful dresses for something to fit over her ample breasts and growing belly, Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi insists she won’t wear maternity clothes.
Eyeing a frilly floral option, she moans, “I’d look like a cupcake” in a voice that weaves through the sound spectrum, tickling every octave.
The pint-size “Jersey Shore” star settles on a body-hugging sequined silver mini-dress. Her makeup artist gives her an approving thumbs up, saying, “Now that’s a MILF dress.”
It’s exactly what the 24-year-old expectant mother wants to hear as she strides onto the set of The Post’s maternity fashion shoot at a Flatiron District children’s play center.
Polizzi isn’t letting impending motherhood change her signature style: towering heels, heavy strokes of eye makeup and more animal print than the Bronx Zoo.
PHOTOS: SNOOKI’S PREGNANT STYLE
“As long as I feel comfortable, I’m going to dress up and wear heels,” says Polizzi, clad in leather leggings, and still naturally tawny despite giving up her favorite pastime — tanning — for the sake of her future baby boy.
“I’ll never be pale. And he’s really tan,” she says of fiancé and baby daddy Jionni LaValle, who’s protectively flanking her as she munches on a tomato-and-mozzarella sandwich. “We’re really lucky.”
The pair — who plan to marry when their baby can walk and be a part of the ceremony — met on the Jersey shore when Polizzi was filming in the summer of 2010.
“We just kind of collided,” says LaValle, a 25-year-old student who owns an ATM business.
Their collision sparked rumors that Polizzi was with child in February. She formally announced it in March and is due in early September.
“I always wanted to have kids with him, but it just happened a little sooner than I thought,” says Polizzi. “My initial reaction was ‘yay!’ and then, ‘Oh, crap, what’s going to happen with filming and stuff?’ ” says Polizzi, who had just started shooting her MTV spinoff “Snooki & JWoww,” which begins Thursday, when she found out the news.
The show was meant to follow the pair’s hijinks and debauchery while bunking together in Jersey City, but instead starts off with Polizzi’s big baby reveal — just as the girls are about to sign a lease on a bachelorette pad.
“Instead of life throwing me a curveball, it threw me a spermball,” she jokes.
J-Woww, on the other hand, is speechless, and clips from the rest of the season foreshadow major mama drama.
“This is supposed to be me and Nicole’s last hurrah and she’s not hurrah-ing,” complains J-Woww in a confessional, before cutting to her boozing it up in a club with Snooks standing there emotionless.
“You’ll see me being responsible and Jenni kind of go wild and crazy,” confirms Polizzi, who now prefers movies to clubs, and crafting to fist-pumping.
The pair are currently filming in Seaside Heights for the last season of “Jersey Shore,” with Polizzi living apart from her co-stars.
The baby mama insists she’s lost her taste for pickles and alcohol — instead craving pineapple to combat her hot flashes.
Still, she admits she’s looking forward to a glass of pinot grigio post-birth. Whether she’ll want the booze in the delivery room depends on the level of pain after delivery, which she says will be pretty standard: “[The birth] will be in a hospital, with a doctor, an epidural. You know, normal,” she says.
She and LaValle hope to give their boy a classic Italian name such as Lorenzo, and will dress him in Ralph Lauren and Gucci shoes.
“I want a swagged-out little boy,” declares Polizzi, who has already bought the baby a tiger outfit, a santa outfit and a white tuxedo because she thought they were “cute.”
Asked if she idolizes any celebrity mother, Polizzi pauses before proclaiming, “I don’t really pay attention to what other celebrities do.”
That is, except for mogul Jessica Simpson, who she looks up to as a businesswoman.
“She has everything,” says Polizzi, who herself just released her second novel, “Gorilla Beach,” and hawks signature Snooki products ranging from sunglasses to perfume and self-tanning lotion. “I feel like I could [have the same business model].” But, she adds, everything would be animal print.
As for her reality-show future, Polizzi thinks fans will want to see her morph from party girl to yummy mummy, and says that if MTV offers her and LaValle a new show, “of course” they’ll do it.
After all, says the former party monster, “People think I’m an airhead and a drunk and dumb. But I’m a freaking genius.”