Lust, Livelihood, and the Love Island Lexicon
An excerpt from Humble Pie by Olivia Crandall
Gird your bikini-clad loins: A new season of Love Island premiers tonight. The reality TV dating show is notorious for its unique blend of British slang, from buzzin’ (very excited) and the ick (sudden cringe) to pied off (big rejection). But, as Olivia Crandall writes in Humble Pie, pastry doesn’t just serve as the show’s euphemism for rejection, but as a “sensory mess of shame” via the mid-series game Snog, Marry, Pie. Read on for Olivia’s piece on Love Island’s pie fixation.
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Turned On and Pied Off: Lust, Livelihood, and the Love Island Lexicon
Essay by Olivia Crandall
Illustration by Elena Foraker
Love Island has its own language. For the uninitiated, it’s basically like any other reality dating show, but longer (upwards of sixty episodes each season), more invasively filmed (we’re talking in-bed night vision cams), more transparent in its goals (the public gets to vote in eliminations, a precursor to the way the public later decides which “islanders” will get fame, attention, and a fat stack of sponcon dollars), and most notably, more British. The show is nothing without its thick accents and specific slang that have most Americans smashing on the subtitles.
It’s more than just a vat of Essex accents, though. Love Island is a verbal universe rich with slang, metaphor, and oral tradition. There’s grafting (flirting with gusto) and buzzin’ (very excited). There’s the melt (acting soft) and the ick (sudden cringe). There’s the annual creation of a new euphemistic scale of sex acts, often unique to each gender. And there’s a whole lot of pie. Pieing off (big rejection), pie-to-the-face (humiliating literal tin full of mystery cream), and a branded novelty water bottle full of subtext in between.
“I got mad love for you but I’m also a petty bitch and you kissed Summer in our bed, so you get the pie.” —Indiyah Polack. (2022, July 19). “Snog, Marry, Pie.” Love Island, Series 8, ep. 43.
When the islanders use the phrase “pied off,” they’re referring to rejection. Whether it be indifference or a firm dumping, when you’ve been “pied,” you’ve been snubbed, almost always romantically. This usage was not invented in the villa (Cosmopolitan UK claims its “origin” is “Newcastle”), but the notion and verbiage of pieing are inextricable from the Love Island lexicon. Pie is never just pie.
In some ways, the language of Love Island could be considered a familect—the islanders (an unhinged, transient family unit) use invented and redefined words and phrases as a means to reinforce their bonds. When the girls use “manicure” and “blowdry” to refer to handjobs and blowjobs, it feels more like twelve-year-olds discreetly gossiping in the back of class than adults cheekily detailing their shared-bedroom sexual exploits. The real words are avoided to save face. An islander could say “he’s not interested in fucking me because I do not meet the big-titty-tiny-waist beauty standards and dangerous tanning regimen these lads demand,” but the phrase “I got pied off” serves as a verbal softener. Islanders can express what happened without looking frustrated or upset or, even worse, self-serious—a death sentence when the overarching goals are looking hot, winning followers, and fine, maybe finding a cute summer love.
While it’s heavily leveraged in conversation, “pied off” has a more literal (and intense) use case later on. The mid-series game, “Snog, Marry, Pie” is seemingly just a game—a villa twist on Fuck, Marry, Kill. Armed with soggy crusts of whipped cream, each islander is forced to confess crushes, mark territory, and express fury at inevitable infidelity by way of Casa Amor (the “twist” each season where the boys and girls are split up by gender and introduced to an entirely new set of potential matches).
Second only to the challenge where islanders have to baby-bird condiments into each other’s mouths, getting pied is a sensory mess of shame. It’s not the reasons everyone must give for who they choose to pie that make it humiliating, but the sheer amount of goo. The eternal objective on Love Island is to look sexy, and being face-fucked with curdled dairy products—in slow-motion of course—then standing around to let the cream dry into a mottled paste is not exactly the right kind of hot. The mortification continues as each islander must then complete their confessional, recounting the details of their pieing as if it was a totally gleeful occurrence, still spackled in creamy sludge.
The annual pieing in Love Island sometimes breaks from the long-running tradition of pieing as a source of campy levity onscreen, demonstrated by The Three Stooges, Grease, and damn near everything Nickelodeon produced in the ’90s. Series 8 brought us Love Island’s first deaf contestant, Tasha, who got pied by four separate boys without valid justification (their scripted reasons were basically “lol idk no one likes you”). She didn’t smooch anyone at Casa Amor and was a pretty consistent pal to other islanders, but was still left in tears, face smothered in humiliating gloop. Fans lost their shit. This was too far. Broadcasting watchdog Ofcom received 1,509 complaints on this pie incident alone, with many fans citing bullying and misogyny. To both the audience and the contestants, getting pied on Love Island is not analogous to getting slimed on Nickelodeon. The lines between “a silly gag” and “humiliation,” “just a game” and “real life” are nonexistent.
So why does anyone watch this whipped cream-coated shit show? There’s an argument here for the choice feminism of it all. We can cheer on Indiyah pieing her unfaithful partner Demi, standing her ground with an asterisk-laden rejection that strategically pushes her closer to winning the final episode cash prize. But I’d argue we’re just drawn to the sweet satisfaction of raw catharsis, watching these sparkly bimbos and himbos crash and burn from the comfort of our normie homes. We might not have a million followers to shill stringy little Oh Polly club lewks, but at least our pores aren’t caked with claggy cream.
Olivia Crandall is a writer and artist whose favorite pie may or may not be Pop-Tarts.
Illustration by Elena Foraker.