'Love Island effect' driving up demand for cosmetic surgery

The “Love Island effect” is being blamed for a “dramatic increase” in the number of women, often young, seeking to have cosmetic surgery.

The number of high street salons offering cosmetic surgery has also increased.

One plastic surgeon told Sky News that younger women increasingly request dermal filler packages, explicitly asking for the “Love Island look”.

A former contestant on the ITV dating show, Malin Andersson, believes cosmetic surgery can become an addiction.

She told Sky News she started getting lip fillers in her late teens, but could not stop.

“I started to develop more body dysmorphia. I’d look in the mirror, see my lips, I think they weren’t big enough. And then I kept repeating it; kept going back for more,” she said.

She thinks there’s a huge number of things persuading women to medically change the way they look, from “social media, the media, the news, online [and] diet culture and magazines”.

But she stressed: “What it boils down to is not being authentic to who you are.

“I wanted to alter how I look, because I didn’t find love from my caregivers growing up, and I thought if I changed my appearance, I’d be loved.”

Cosmetic aesthetics doctor Ed Robinson said after the most recent series of Love Island began, those requests went up 12-fold, and by very young women.

“With Love Island, I saw a dramatic increase in younger, mostly women, requesting dermal filler packages, wanting to achieve a Love Island look because they’d seen people on TV,” he said.

He said he finds the trend concerning: “Aesthetic treatments are not about looking like someone else. They’re about small, subtle tweaks to improve your appearance, but that should always be bespoke to your individual anatomy; and conservative approaches are definitely better.

“But we see this all the time, and the Kardashians are another example. Every time they say that they’ve had a treatment, you get a huge surge in people wanting those specific things.”

‘A public health issue’

Dr Robinson’s theory seems to fit a national trend.

The global data company Experian found that in the past five years the number of beauty salons offering treatment increased by 31%. In Scotland, they jumped by 42% and in the North of England there was a 46% rise.

For Julie Cameron, associate director at UK charity the Mental Health Foundation, the rise in young people seeking cosmetic procedures is “a public health issue”.

She said young people are being encouraged to get into debt, seeking irreversible aesthetic procedures, which she said can have “detrimental effects on your wider physical health as well as your mental health”.

“I think the general trend for everything to be happening much younger is a real concern, because when 15 and 16-year-olds make the decision to get lip filler, because they’ve been doing face routines and skin routines since the age of 10 and 11, where does that go next?”