Love Island has returned to the nation’s screens again and, with it, concerns over unattainable and unrealistic beauty standards.
Often these can only be achieved by undergoing cosmetic procedures, with cosmetic practitioners seeing a rise in the number of women wanting to look like the stars they see on their screen.
This has been coined the ‘Love Island effect’, promoting the ‘ideal’ look as plump lips, a square jaw, flat stomach and larger breasts.
A ComRes study for BBC Radio 5 Live found that 21% of 18-24 year-olds would be more likely to consider having cosmetic procedures or plastic surgery after watching reality TV shows like Love Island and The Only Way Is Essex.
Celebrities who have had cosmetic procedures reversed – from Chloe Ferry to Molly-Mae Hague
There are even practitioners out there who offer a Love Island package, suggesting treatments you can have to look like the onscreen stars.
That’s not to say that Botox and fillers are inherently bad. It’s understandable that people may want to enhance their natural looks or fix an insecurity.
However, when these procedures become a trend it can have far more damaging effects, causing people to go for low-cost and, therefore, low-quality procedures where the practitioner may not have the right training or qualifications.
Recently, former Love Island stars have been ditching the high maintenance beauty routines since their stint on the show, returning to their natural looks.
Molly-Mae Hague, who appeared on series five of Love Island in 2019, insisted she looked five years younger after getting her fillers dissolved.
She confessed on The Diary Of A CEO podcast: "I wouldn’t say I got addicted to it, but by the age of 21, I didn’t look like the same person.
"I literally looked like a different person. When I look back at pictures now, I’m terrified of myself. I’m like, "Who was that girl?" I don’t know what happened.
"But there was this one pivotal moment where I’d gone and got loads of filler and I posted a YouTube video and I hadn’t let the filler settle and it was really swollen and a screenshot from that video, it trended on Twitter for weeks.”
Shaughna Phillips, who appeared on the first ever winter Love Island, also followed in Molly’s footsteps, getting her lip filler dissolved in February 2022.
Sharing the process with her Instagram followers, Shaughna encouraged fans to separate their happiness from their body image. She added: 'I was SO hesitant about having my lips dissolved because I honestly don't remember what I even look like without them! But there's more to life than what size your bloody lips are.”
This isn't just a trend among Love Island stars. Kylie Jenner shocked fans when she revealed she had dissolved her signature lip filler in 2018.
The youngest of the Kardashian-Jenner sisters made an absolute fortune from her killer pout. She is often credited by many for popularising lip fillers, especially among the younger generation.
Her lip kits, sold through her company Kylie Cosmetics, have played a huge part in her now being one of the richest women on planet earth – but it wasn't without consequences.
In 2015 a viral internet challenge spread like wildfire across the web, dubbed the Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge. Young teens and Kylie fans were inserting their mouths into jars, cups or caps in order to create a vacuum and cause their lips to swell.
This was dangerous as the suction can cause blood vessels to break and cause permanent damage to the mouth.
The announcement that she had removed her filler came from Kylie herself. The mum of two responded to a fan commenting that she looked like the “old Kylie” in an Instagram pic. She said: “I got rid of all my filler.”
Another ITV star, TOWIE's Megan McKenna, also completely transformed her face after deciding to ditch the filler and make the most of her natural lip shape.
In an interview with Fabulous Magazine the star said: “I spent three years pumping it in, pumping it in, thinking: ‘They’re not big enough, let’s get some more.’ I became obsessed with my lips. I’d take a photo of myself and if I didn’t think they looked big enough I’d make them bigger with an editing app.
“Honestly I think I had body dysmorphia, because when I look back at pictures of myself now I am horrified. I look like a duck. I don’t know how they didn’t bump into things! I can’t believe what I looked like.
"And no one could tell me. No one. Not my mum or anyone. It sounds pathetic, but I thought I’d look ugly without them.”
Megan revealed that the catalyst for dissolving her fillers came when she performed at Hyde Park as the warm up for Michael Buble in 2018.
She said: “Every headline the next day was about me and my big lips. I’d left my job on TOWIE to really smash this and so to have everything become about my lips was upsetting. I want people to be talking about my voice – I don’t want people looking at my lips."
Megan Barton-Hanson is another Love Island star who has opened up about her experience undergoing her first cosmetic procedure to have her ears pinned back when she was just 17, adding that it “didn’t help her to love herself.”
Speaking toThe Sunin June 2021, she said: “The surgery helped me diminish the obsessive nature of my insecurities, but while it made me feel happier when looking in the mirror, that's just surface level.
“It didn't help me to love myself, that came from growing up and having a strong circle of empowered women around me.”
Megan has since decided to embrace her natural beauty, having her lip fillers dissolved and the clips in her ears removed. Aside from preventative botox, the star has sworn off surgery and urges fans to think long and hard about undergoing any surgical procedures, insisting they aren’t a quick fix.
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