The Era of "Love Island Face" Is Over

A recent Love Island promo prompted Twitter to question if facial injectables are on their way out

Twitter doesn’t like aesthetic change. Any home that’s remodeled- even for the better- is met with assertions that the interior designer or even just the homeowners should be executed via firing squad. The same fate is threatened to plastic surgeons who alter what they see as majestic Roman noses. Twitter loathes when people alter vintage dresses. So it’s no surprise that Twitter might be a bit more anti-filler than your average person. But even so—the tide is changing on filler, and it has been for quite some time.

First, let’s take a step back. For the uninitiated: what is filler? Filler is basically injecting substances (sometimes substances that are akin to what’s made naturally by the human body- hyaluronic acid for example) into various facial features to make them bigger. The most well-known use for fillers is the lips, but they’re commonly used in any area that’s hollow or undefined—flat cheeks, sunken under-eye circles, etc. They’ve even been used to manifest completely new jawlines. Filler can be injected around your nose to make it appear smaller, which is called a liquid rhinoplasty. Filler is also very commonly used. Filler is so popular that in 2022, more people got filler than even Botox. A good example of the level of filler used by regular, everyday people is below:

Personally, I recall growing up in the ‘90s and ‘00s with filler existing in the form of “collagen injections,” and it was something that I associated only with retired B-list models in Miami. When I was in my mid twenties, Kylie Jenner became famous for her magical puberty that mysteriously transformed her entire face (which of course, she later admitted was filler after initially using the metamorphosis to hawk her lip kits). I started becoming curious about filler myself. I researched all the areas that I might need it—I don’t have very big lips, and I do have under-eye circles, and my face isn’t all that round or heart-shaped, perhaps I needed bigger cheeks. The more I read about filler, and the more time I spent on Instagram, the more confident I was that I needed it injected in every square inch of my face. Filler advocates would even promise that getting filler at a young age, before we “needed” it, would stimulate our body to produce more collagen over time, and reduce aging long term—so what was I waiting for?

However, my OCD came to the rescue. I read one article about how filler can (rarely) cause blindness, and that was enough for me. I couldn’t imagine going blind and having to live with that for the rest of my life, knowing I only did it to get Kylie Jenner lips. My husband and I were also newlyweds on a tight budget and given that I would only get filler at a safe, high-quality provider, I was worried about the cost, so I ultimately decided I wouldn’t do it. But I still felt inadequate when I saw my female friends and colleagues, appearing with a new face one by one, not to mention the viral addition of eyelash extensions that made everyone look like a My Little Pony character. I had a few friends who had them done in a way that I couldn’t really notice, but the overall trend in my age and socioeconomic group was that filler was slowly turning an increasingly large number of women into their own makeshift ethnicity, with identical facial features.