Love Island’s Shaughna Phillips: She’s Kind, Funny And Beloved By (Nearly) Everyone

'I ain’t shaving a single thing until Callum comes back... And depending on how he comes back, I might not be shaving after that either.' Oh, Shaughna Phillips. How do we love thee? Let Grazia count the ways.

This funny, outspoken Love Islander has stolen our hearts, even if she hasn’t managed to locate Callum’s. There’s her command of cockney rhyming slang, the likes of which hasn’t been seen on television since Only Fools and Horses. There’s the way she combines high glamour and frankly insane eyelashes (how can she even see Callum?) with a smart job as a democratic services officer. She also joined a fire safety team in the weeks after the Grenfell Tower tragedy.

You know where you are with Shaughna. When she objected to Sophie trying to persuade Nas to save her rather than his actual love interest, she said so – not just behind her back, but gently to her face. When she saw that Sophie was upset, she apologised unreservedly.

She has the very underrated, undramatic qualities of someone we’d all want in our lives: she’s straightforward, emotionally intelligent and kind.

Yes, there’s always a chance that when she sees Callum Jones return from Casa Amor tonight, with (we're guessing) Molly Smith (who has triggered some sort of neural meltdown in him, leaving him capable only of murmuring 'sexual attraction' over and over again), she may take out her earrings and hit the roof – and if she does, good luck to him.

But I’m not sure. She’s shown no signs of being, as Paige put it, 'a psycho Sally'. In fact, she’s been graciously tolerant of some of Callum’s most sketchy behaviour to date – for example, that time he turned on her with, 'You made Sophie cry!', despite not having actually been there or heard the whole story.

With Shaughna, there’s also the sense that she’s been through a lot, and survived some war wounds. Her father died three years ago of cancer; she has a tattoo on her arm in his memory. Her ex cheated on her, and she told the girls: 'I always used to think if I got cheated on, it’d be door shut, go away. It's not like that – cheating messes you up. I could never do that to anyone.' It's probably why Ofcom has received complaints about how tortured she appears to be.

She revealed to Callum that she’s lost four stone, and she’s clearly transformed her appearance in other ways too; she’s open about her insecurities – and we love her for not neglecting her spot cream routine just because she’s in bed with someone she fancies. She's a bit of us.

Through no fault of her own, Shaughna has emerged as an underdog this series. She had the bad luck of coupling up with a guy who was then pursued by two subsequent new islanders; now she’s had to face him heading off to Casa Amor, and she has the uneasy feeling that he can’t be trusted. We've all been in that relationship – you hope you’re wrong, but you know deep down you’re right. She hasn’t tried to style out this vulnerability with bravado; she’s admitted she feels awful. This show of vulnerability just makes us love her more.

And yet she’s also got swagger, our Shaughna. She knows who she is, is confident enough to make fun of herself, and made a beeline on arrival for the man she considered to be the hottest in the villa. She’s going to bounce back from whatever happens at tonight’s recoupling and go on to better things, because she’s our girl and that’s what she does.

Callum, meanwhile, may have found someone whose clothes he wants to rip off (did he mention that?), but he’s still the clueless 23-year-old who’s never had a proper relationship. Shaughna is lightyears ahead of him and, as she once put it herself, 'I’ve come to Love Island to find a boyfriend, not a son.'

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Nevertheless, we’ll be watching tonight’s show through our fingers – because we suspect she’s in for a right Tony Blair.

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