There's always the same online rhetoric when a new season of Love Island starts. The first thing people do is critique the girls’ appearances, picking them apart for what work they think they’ve had done. I watched the commentary start up again this year thinking, ‘Same old, same old.’
It was a similar story when I was on the show in season three. But then something shifted. Videos have started popping up of aesthetic practitioners criticising the ‘work’ the female contestants had supposedly had – accusing them of looking in their forties and fifties due to Botox and filler.
I can’t abide this faux concern. I see it a lot, people feigning worry about young women injecting their faces, when what they’re actually doing is passive aggressively critiquing their looks. They’re not genuinely worried about them, they just want to spout venom in a way that makes them sound credible. Maybe if we stopped picking young women apart from head to toe, we wouldn’t see so many of them queuing up to get injectables. And to be clear, none of us know exactly what tweakments any of the Love Islanders have had done – everything is speculative.
I’ve had the ‘you look older because of Botox’ line thrown at me before, completely unsolicited, and it always strikes me as strange. You would never tell someone with what you assumed to be a ‘natural’ nose, ‘Oh god, your nose is awful!’ But when someone is presumed to have had a tweakment, people think they have licence to publicly critique it.
At its core, much of the commentary about the young women on reality television is ageist. We assume women are always seeking youth. But who’s to say that any of the Love Island girls had their treatments to look younger? Maybe they just wanted bigger lips, maybe they like the fact they look older!
Ultimately, we don’t actually know what they’ve had done or why, but we do know these women are going to leave the villa and be floored by the commentary around how they look. I was lucky, as a model I was used to being picked apart by casting agents daily. These young women may not have such a thick skin.
It’s true that we need to have a bigger conversation around the prevalence and harms of unregulated injectables for young women – but that conversation is much bigger than one reality TV show. Making my documentary, The Price Of Perfection, I learned that because we have an unregulated aesthetics industry in this country, anyone can inject Botox or filler. You don’t have to be a doctor, nor have a licence, so it’s become far too readily available and so cheap it’s dangerous. There are horror stories out of people experiencing blindness, tissue damage and infections.
We can absolutely talk about the dangers of unregulated treatments. But right now the conversation around the Love Island contestants is thoughtless trolling.