Cierra & Vanna & Ethics & Vanity

On "Love Island" and what happens when cosmetic work doesn't work.

The latest season of “Love Island: USA” dropped just in time to meet me in the depths of a depressive episode. I haven’t had the will or energy or ability to do anything other than lift the Roku remote and press “SKIP RECAP.” I don’t need a recap. I’m still here, sitting in front of the television, clicking, methodical as an automaton, for the next episode, and the next, and the next, watching a rotating cast of contestants work through their challenges — twerking and tonguing each other, mostly — as a reprieve from working through my own.

The upside to all this, if I can call it that, is that “Love Island” provides much material for a beauty culture critic to mine. Filler and toothpaste seem to occupy a similar space in the Islanders’ routines (nonnegotiable aspects of oral care). Most engage in some level of sun-mulacra (Iris is a tanning technician; Huda dons faux-freckles every morning). Cast member Cierra Ortega was recently removed from the villa after an old social media post of hers resurfaced; in it, she used an anti-Asian slur to explain the benefits of her eye-opening Botox brow lift. (Disturbing as it is, the incident might be an example of an actually useful form of cosmetic transparency: acknowledgment of how systems of discrimination underwrite modern beauty standards.)

Cierra, Vanna

And then there’s contestant Vanna Einerson, who “caused a stir on social media for what many deemed ‘too much’ facial filler,” Kyndall Cunningham writes in a new report for Vox. “Users circulated a screenshot of her facial profile and announced their disbelief that she was only 21. Medical professionals on TikTok posted their own videos dissecting what they believed had been done to her face and detailing where her injector supposedly went wrong.”

Cunningham reached out to me while researching this article to ask, “Why does unsuccessful cosmetic work make people so angry?” I was thrilled to answer — her questions gave me some much-needed motivation in the midst of my melancholia — but, as is the nature of media interviews, the majority of my musings didn’t make the final piece. (Which is excellent, by the way! You should read it here.)

Below, you can find our conversation in full, including my thoughts on the stigma of plastic surgery, how beauty functions as an ethical ideal in society, the conservative logic behind celebrating “undetectable” cosmetic work, and why, sometimes, I think it’s fine — liberating, even? — to say, “Hey, this thing that’s promising to make people look younger is making people look older!”