AJ Bunker has revealed she spent £1k on filler before going on Love Island.
The former hair extension technician said she got filler four times in a month before entering the villa in Majorca over the summer as a bombshell.
Speaking to The Sun’s Fabulous magazine, the 28-year-old explained: “When I found out I was going into the villa, I panicked. I decided to get cheek filler last minute and once I had it done, I just kept going back. I thought ‘I need more, I need more’.”
“I was hoping it would make me look younger, because I had this line under my eye which I thought looked like a big wrinkle or an eye bag; I didn’t want to look tired. I spent all this money but it did the opposite,” she said.
“I was so infatuated in getting rid of this one line, I didn’t realise how much it changed my face shape. It was only when I watched myself back on TV, I realised ‘oh my God that doesn’t even look like me’. I looked like a hamster, my cheeks were so chubby.”
“Someone should have said ‘no, you’ve had enough’, but they just kept taking my money. In that process, I didn’t realise it was making my face look worse.”
AJ continued: “There is definitely pressure to look a certain way (when you go on Love Island). It wasn’t the casting crew, more from looking at past contestants and popular girls on Instagram.”
“I was chasing this generic idea of perfection, rather than learning to love myself and my flaws. You think ‘I’m going to be on TV, I have to look a certain way, this is how girls on TV look’.”
“When I did my auditions, I didn’t have any filler, because I applied for last year’s show (which was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic). So the producers probably thought ‘what happened to her face?’”
“After being dumped from the Villa, my dad rang me and said ‘you’ve been getting trolled about your age’. I thought ‘OK perhaps it’s just because I am a bit older than some of the contestants this year’.”
“But then I went on Twitter and realised it was about my filler and how my face looks old, not actually about my age. It was definitely upsetting,” the reality star admitted.
“People were saying ‘her face is so overfilled’, ‘she looks so fake’, ‘she looks old’, calling me ‘granny AJ’ and ‘she looks like their mum, rather than someone who should be looking for love’.”
“Trolling is never nice and you think with everything that’s happened in the past we would have moved past that, but we haven’t.”
“It was tough in the villa. Obviously none of the guys were interested and now I do think ‘is that because I looked overfilled?’” AJ asked.
“I didn’t look like my normal self and you can’t help but think ‘what if?’ If I hadn’t had the work done, would more of the guys have been interested in me? I went on that show looking for love.”
“It doesn’t help that the guys were quite a bit younger this year. The majority of them were 21 or 22. When I went in, the oldest guy was Teddy and he was still only 26. So not only was I the eldest, but I looked a certain way too. It just adds fuel to the fire.”
“I can understand why people trolled me, because I agree with what they are saying. When I look at my promo pic and video interviews (from after she left the show), I think ‘my face looks awful, I do look old’. Now I think I’ll always be known as ‘granny AJ’.”
AJ said the casting crew warned her not to get work done, but she ignored their advice because she feared she would get trolled.
She explained: “I knew I was going to get judged and thought ‘I want to look a certain way’. I saw this ‘flaw’ which no-one else would have even noticed, but I was trying to iron it out so no-one else could pick on me for it. Ironically, that ended up causing the trolling. My lips looked fake too, but they weren’t as bad as my cheeks.”
“The reaction was a shock. It never even crossed my mind I would be trolled for looking ‘old’, because in my mind I looked good. I thought maybe I’d be trolled for being too skinny or because I’ve got a skin condition. Even now when I’m in the press, I can’t help but look at the comments and people still say ‘you look old’. People message me abuse too.”
AJ has since got her cheek filler dissolved, and has been advised by her doctor to get her lip filler dissolved too.