Suppose you want to win Love Island. After all, you wouldn’t say “no” to a nice holiday abroad and that 50K prize money could definitely come in handy to pay off your student loans. At the same time, you want to be strategic. Is it better to enter the villa at the start or mid-way through the series? Is it best to come on the show in your early twenties or late twenties? In other words, what should you do to maximise your chances of winning Love Island?
See Editor’s Note at bottom
Tonight, the final episode of this season of Love Island will air on live TV. For anyone who has more exciting things to do during their summer than to spend an hour every evening watching a reality TV show, allow me to give you a brief rundown of how the show works.
Love Island is a dating show that follows a relatively simple framework. A dozen single – and conventionally attractive – individuals enter the villa, six men and six women. The individuals then have to “couple up” with one partner from the opposite sex. Throughout the show, new people are brought in; these people are called “Bombshells”, and they try to couple up with the Islanders. Throughout the season, viewers watch the couples split up, find new partners and compete in challenges. At the end of the season, the public votes for the winning couple, who then takes home the £50, 000 prize money.
So, how does any of this help you?
If your aim is to win Love Island, you should start by reviewing the traits and characteristics of the previous winners. By gathering the data together, subtle patterns and recurring trends slowly start to appear, and this is something that you can use to your advantage.
Love Island first appeared on our screens in 2005, but the format was a bit different because the contestants were celebrities rather than general members of the public. The show only ran for two seasons, but then ITV brought it back in 2015. For that reason, I will be exclusively looking at the winning couples from the years 2015-2023.
Is the Only Way Essex?
Of the 18 winners, 5 of them came from Essex and over 50% of them came from the South of England. As Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer have been saying all along, it’s all about “Location Location Location”.
Is Age just a Number?
The mean age of the male winners is 23, and for the women, it’s 22.8.
So far, there have been three relationships where the man is older, three where the woman is older, and three where the couple is exactly the same age.
However, there is something else that we can take away from this data. Excluding the 2018 winners Jack Fincham and Dani Dyer (who shared a 6-year age gap), all other couples have had an age gap between 0 and 3 years.
There has been a notable increase in older Love Island contestants in recent years, with notable celebrity Joey Essex (from the reality TV show, The Only Way is Essex) entering the villa at age 33 this year. This has caused some fans to predict that the average winner’s age will increase in future seasons. However, I’m not totally convinced by this idea. Data from YouGov Profiles reveals that the biggest viewership demographic comes from people aged 18-29. I think that, so long as this is the case, younger viewers will always feel more inclined to vote for the younger couples because they relate to the individual cast members.
To Bombshell or not to Bombshell:
Of the 18 winning individuals, 7 were bombshells, and 11 were originals—‘originals’ are the 12 contestants who start the show in the villa.
If you’re set to go on Love Island and get put in as a bombshell, your best move from here would be to couple up with an original Islander because, apart from Liam Reardon and Millie Court in 2021, all the previous winning couples have consisted of at least one original partner.
As the chart above shows, couples consisting of 1 original and 1 bombshell are the most popular and couples consisting of 2 bombshells are the least common. This is presumably because couples made up of 2 bombshells have had less screen time, so the viewers have had less time to get to know them and, therefore, have less of an incentive to vote for them.
We can further break up the information above by considering the sexes of the originals and bombshells.
Of those 5 winning couples consisting of one bombshell and one original, 4 were ‘female original/male bombshell’, and only one was ‘male original, woman bombshell’.
I think the reason for this discrepancy comes from the fact that Love Island has a predominately female viewership, as shown in Janette Porter and Kay Standing’s 2019 study. A woman watching the show is more likely to become emotionally invested in a female original rather than a male original. Therefore, when the viewer comes to cast her vote for the winning couple, she will be more likely to vote for her favourite female Islander, even if the viewer doesn’t have any real investment in her male partner.
Love is in the Hair:
Love Island winners have flaunted a range of hair colours over the years. Whilst hair colour can be a very subjective thing, in general, most of the Love Islander winners have some shade of brown hair.
That being said, the wide spread of results points to this not being the most important variable in determining whether a couple will take home the prize.
Does Time Make the Heart Grow Fonder?
It is difficult to precisely figure out how many days a couple has been together. Sometimes a couple is unofficially ‘together’ even when they’re not coupled up and, as you would expect, a lot of the couples are off and on again. But roughly, the winning couple is together for 39 days, when you discount season one as an anomalous result.
With all this in mind, can we speculate about the winners of this year’s Love Island?
I sat down to watch this season’s Love Island (for purely journalistic purposes, I promise). After weeks of ‘pulling people for chats’ and flirtatious banter, there are four remaining couples that the public can vote for:
- Matilda and Sean
- Mimi and Josh
- Nicole and Ciaran
- Jess and Ayo
Based on what we know about the previous winners, the couple that best matches our description and fits in with the results is Ciaran Davies and Nicole Samuel.
Region [This is the one category that the couple doesn’t quite fit into] – They both come from South Wales and live less than an hour’s car drive from each other. A Love Island winner has come from Wales before, and whilst this is not the ‘South of England’, it is still in the southern half of Great Britain.
Age – At age 24, Nicole Davies is this season’s youngest ‘original’ girl, and her partner Ciaran, born in 2003, is the youngest boy in the villa. The two of them share a three-year age gap.
Bombshell – Both Ciaran and Nicole are both originals.
Hair – Ciaran has dark brown hair and Nicole has light brown hair.
Relationship Length – The pair has been in a couple since day five, meaning that have spent 37 days together in the villa.
So there you have it. You should wait until you’re 22/23 years old, dye your hair brown, travel from your London apartment to arrive in the villa on day one, and boom…you have already massively increased your odds of winning Love Island. Of course, other factors, such as a contestant’s ethnicity, body type and personality also come into play. But hopefully now, the key to winning (arguably) the UK’s most popular reality TV show is closer within reach. Despite what the name indicates, Love Island is not a competition for the strongest love connection. Maybe the “real” winners are the ones who find love in the villa… but the official winners are the ones who walk away with the 50K. To win Love Island, you must win the hearts of the viewers.
When seen plainly, winning Love Island is a case of ticking boxes and figuring out how to appeal to the average young female viewer. Love Island has always followed a simple, almost formulaic structure, and understanding this is a major key to winning the show.
Editor’s Note:
Nicole and Ciaran came second. The winners of Love Island 2024 were Mimi Ngulube and Josh Oyinsan. Mimi is 24 years old from Portsmouth and Josh is 29 and lives in Kent; the two of them share a five year age gap and neither one of them have brown hair. She is an original, he is a bombshell and they have been together for less than three weeks. Making history as the first black couple to win the show, they defeated all odds and showed that true love can beat the system.