“It makes me cry because I feel like it’s something that was not accepted as much,” Page says. “As someone who watched Love Island so much, I watched my sisters come on there with wigs, and the thing is, I never bashed them because at the end of the day, you get approached differently as a Black woman, this is known. When you have braids, you get certain attention from men versus when you have a wig on your head, you get a different amount of attention, especially when you’re going on a show that [stars] primarily white people.”
“The braids? Honey, you’re going home,” she continues, while laughing. “You’re out. It was a decision, and honestly, I didn’t think that I would get put on the show solely for that reason, because I did my interviews in wigs.”
Page says she wore a different hairstyle for each of her interviews for the show. “[The producers] were like, ‘You need to wear the same hair you have in this interview to the island,’” she recalls. “And then as I’m getting ready, I was like, ‘I’m not about to fight with my lace all summer.’ The first time I saw braids on Love Island was Justine [from Love Island Games]. That’s actually the reason I wore them, because I was like, ‘Justine wore them and she did the damn thing… I know they told me to wear this wig, but I’m about to risk it. I’m going to go get these braids.’”
After arriving in Fiji for season 6, Page remembers meeting the Peacock team for the first time in person. They said she “looked different.”
“I went back to my room and cried because I was like, ‘I’m not going on,’” she says. “It was nerve-wracking. It’s nice to know how well it was perceived when I got out [the villa]. I didn’t even know when I was in there that people were seeing my different styles as a thing. That’s me on the regular. I hate having one style for too long, so I would always just switch it up. I was getting bored with my braids in the villa. I almost took them out and wore my ‘fro because I was so sick of them.”
Page’s hair wasn’t the only hot topic of conversation. She often did Beckham’s hair while on the show, another authentic aspect of their journey that fans became obsessed with. “Man, I was doing his hair all the time,” she says with a smile. “And to this day, he’ll go get his hair done professionally because I’ll be busy, and he’ll come home and be like, ‘Baby, I don’t like it. Can you redo my hair?’ He just got a free hairstylist for the rest of his life.”
It’s been a full year since Page and Beckham coupled up in the villa. Roughly a month after leaving Fiji — with $50,000 each — Beckham asked Page to be his girlfriend. She says that their relationship outside of the villa genuinely feels the same.
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