“B*tch, what are you reading?”
Love Island star Chloe Burrows is about as candid and open as it gets. Within minutes of her arriving at GLAMOUR HQ, we are comparing notes on how overrated matcha is. Not long after we are comparing our recent reads. She’s really into dragons and romantasy, by the way. “They change your brain. I read it a year and a half ago and I’ve not been the same since. All I want to do is consume dragon smut.”
Sipping on an iced coffee and wearing a knit polo co-ord set by Molly Mae’s Maebe, she’s got the reality TV star slash girl next door look, vibe and chat nailed. She tells me she has “no rizz” – charm, social skills, charisma – but nothing could be further from the truth.
Her new documentary, Love In The Wild, sees her jump head first into the world of IRL dating, looking at society’s dating app fatigue and why we now find meeting a potential partner without the protection of a digital screen so very daunting.
From a fully-clothed ITV-appropriate, PG version of “tantric speed dating” – which involved a lot of slow-dance style hugging and trust falls with strangers – to teaming up with a group of singles tasked to find someone dressed up as a chicken (a rather unique bonding exercise), Chloe becomes the Bear Grylls of dating IRL, after making her name on a quest for love in a very unreal environment, the Love Island villa.
“I feel like you can never explain how intense it was,” she says of her time making connections on the reality TV show. “There are feelings that you have for people in there, whether it’s friendship or romantic, that you wouldn’t get in real life, because it’s so intense. It’s every second of every day, there’s no distractions, you don’t even know what time it is. All you’re thinking about is ‘she’s my best friend’ and ‘I love him’. You can’t replicate that.”
When GLAMOUR asks if Love Island can be feminist, Chloe says that any inequalities between men and women in the villa are wider reflections of what’s already there in the outside world.
“I will say it amplifies things that are [already] in general society,” she says. “When these boys are messing around, they’re all laughing and patting each other on the back, and when a girl’s having a cheeky little snuggle in a terrace she’s in trouble. But it happens every day. So, you know, it’s just putting that on the stage.”
Courtesy of ITV
Her time in the villa also opened her up to “taking the bull by the horns”. “My biggest lesson from going on Love Island is maybe we should all just start snogging people in games,” she says. “Sometimes it works.”
