Love Island is one of the most beloved reality shows on TV at the moment. Everyone seems to be engrossed by the young, good looking singles searching for love in an exotic villa in South Africa. The drama. The romance. Who doesn’t love that? But it could be argued that it is having a more negative than positive impact on today’s youth. Is the entertainment worth risking the mental health of others? 

A heavily criticised part of the show is the lack of body diversity. The majority of men have six packs and the girls have toned, slim bodies. Whilst it is perfectly fine to have this body type, there are many others types we should be celebrating. The show seems to set unrealistic standards for how bodies should look and leads to many teenage viewers wondering why their bodies do not look like that, this train of though it very detrimental to mental health as well.  The show gains millions of views every year and should surely be presenting all different types of bodies, especially considering the thousands of applicants? 

Not only are there unrealistic body standards but also unrealistic representations of relationships. Being isolated in the villa and not having a real world experience masks what a person is truly like in a relationship, which is why most couples who leave the villa end up breaking up. Also, there is much misogyny happening in the villa. In Love Island 2022, popular couple Tasha and Andrew both brought back different people but Tasha was victim of a lot more hate and labelled a cheater compared to Andrew. Unfortunately, this happens quite a lot. Women are often seen as objects and talked about as such. These do not set good examples for how youth should be treating their partners.     

Finally, many of the contestants have been victims to cyber bullying and have received much hate for even appearing on the show. Due to the popularity of the show, the contestants are thrown into the spotlight and immediately start to gain social media followers. However, they are constantly judged by how they are edited on people’s screens and therefore get lots of hateful comments. So not only does this show have a negative impact on the viewers mental health but contestants as well.  

So while we enjoy the dramas of this year’s crop of love struck contestants let us not forget the costly impact this could potentially have on the impressionable and vulnerable youth of today.