Out and a pout in Love Island world where attraction is purely cosmetic

What message is the arrival — again — of budget Botox sending out to young people, wonders Sophie Donaldson

UNTIL this summer, Kylie Jenner had the most famous cosmetically enhanced lips on the planet. Then, two things happened; in July, Jenner decided to remove her fillers, allowing her lips to gently deflate to their natural shape. Then, Megan Barton Hanson and her swollen pout entered the Love Island villa and young women everywhere had a new set of smackers to obsess over.

The success of the reality show over the past two years delights and confuses in equal measure. There were only two types of people this summer: those who religiously tuned in and those befuddled by the allure. Whatever the reason for its popularity, no doubt its sponsors couldn’t be happier — none more so than Superdrug. The health and beauty giant, with stores throughout Ireland and the UK, saw a profit increase of 16pc in 2017. This has been attributed in part to sponsorship of the show.

This year, Superdrug upped the ante with its Love Island cosmetics. The retailer has cannily capitalised on the lithe young things in the villa whose combined influence on popular culture is immense but not always positive.

Health professionals fear the programme has the power to make many viewers insecure about their own bodies. Along with Barton Hanson, Laura Anderson and Dani Dyer, who won the 2018 series with her beau Jack Fincham, have also been open about having cosmetic procedures.

The unusually pert bottoms, glaringly white teeth and wrinkle-free foreheads not only become idolised, they become normalised, and so the quest to achieve a similar physicality begins.

It starts with a Google search; last year, 200,000 consumers visited the Superdrug website when the show aired. There, they find all the fake tan, bronzer, teeth-whitening kits, slimming pills and protein shakes they need to Love Island-ify themselves.

As of last week, you can also phone and book in for Botox, prices starting at just £99.

Responding to “demand for anti-wrinkle and skin rejuvenation treatments”, the retailer is also providing non-surgical cosmetic treatments including thermal fillers. Appointments will be in a private room in a Superdrug store with a nurse who will administer the treatment, only be available to those over 25.

The news that you can now get ‘budget’ Botox on the high street has been met with derision from some medical professionals.

Last month, Claire Murdoch, the national mental health director for NHS England, wrote to the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK. She was concerned that young viewers were not sufficiently protected from the potentially harmful messaging of advertisements for cosmetic surgery shown during the programme.

While it is vital that underage viewers are protected as much as possible, another demographic is far more vulnerable to the ongoing discourse that they will never be quite good enough. They are in their early to mid-20s, an age group for whom television is reality, and the internet indispensable. They are old enough to have some disposable income, but far too young to understand what it feels to be comfortable in one’s own skin. They couldn’t afford a cosmetic treatment that costs as much as their monthly rent, but could find £99 to spare.

This is not the first time Superdrug has offered high street Botox. In 2007, the retailer planned to make Botox treatments available in 20 stores but the offering quietly disappeared. The world has changed in the 10 years since Superdrug’s initial foray into cosmetic procedures. Young women have been conditioned to believe that body hair is a sin. Many probably can’t remember their natural skin tone, having coated themselves in a coloured stain for years in an effort to appear ‘bronzed’, a term in itself utterly deranged. Bronze is the colour of a coat button or athletics medal, not skin. And yet we do not pause to consider the language employed to discuss our bodies — sculpt, prime, smooth are more fitting for a machine, not a human.

Despite its initial failure, it will probably turn out that high street Botox-and-fillers wasn’t a bad idea, just bad timing. It’s not that we weren’t ready the first time, we just weren’t insecure enough.