Each series, we always form a special, perhaps unhealthy, bond with our Love Island girlies.
You can't help it really, can you? Watching someone's quest for true love unfold on your telly every night for weeks and weeks – you grow attached and feel like you know them when you definitely don't.
That's always slightly awkward when you're in heatworld's position – where you can invite them round for a chat in your studio or office hours after they've set foot back on UK soil – because you end up going up to them and chatting to them like you used to get wasted at uni together or something, when in reality, they don't even know you're name and most of the time, they don't care what it is.
This year we grew particularly attached to bombshell Claudia Fogarty because she is quite literally all of us singletons. The second we saw her strut through those villa doors like an awkward af Victoria Secret model we felt an immediate bond.
Add her warm personality, her laugh, her accent, her love for her family and her general warm aura and we just wish this friendship we've built in our heads to be real tbh.
Luckily, another of our favourite girlies (not a Love Island girlie, but certainly Love Island adjacent), Grace Keeling, AKA GK Barry invited the blonde bombshell onto her Saving Grace podcast this week for a spot of tea spilling.
Unfortunately, it seems the ep was filmed some time ago, certainly before the Love Island reunion, as the girls were talking about Olivia Hawkins and Maxwell Samuda and Casey O'Gorman and Rosie Seabrook as if they were still together – which they're definitely not (RIP).
Nevertheless, Claudia did reveal a couple of juicy tidbits we hadn't heard before.
Our girl spilled a fair amount of tea in the first few minutes of her chinwag with Grace, but the piping hot stuff was spilled when she revealed that not only was she in the holding villa/hotel in South Africa for three weeks prior to her iconic heart rate challenge entrance, BUT before signing up for Love Island altogether she presented producers with a strict demand. Icon.
Claudia revealed that during the audition process she told producers that she didn't want to go on as a Casa Amor girl – and that was a requisite of her involvement in the series. She explained how she didn't mind being a bombshell, but insinuated that it never goes well for Casa girls – unless your name's Sanam Harrinanan, obvs.
She told Grace, "The one thing I said was that I don't want to do Casa Amor."
Grace added, "Fair play because that's just... you're not surviving."
To which Claudia replied, "No. Yeah, my point. I just said, 'I don't want to do Casa, but I'm happy to be a bombshell.' And they said, 'Well, we're going to put you in as one of the early bombshells'. I think I would've rather been a bombshell; you kind of put an impact in, don't you? I was like, 'Right, I'll do that.'"
And boy, did she bombshell. All hail.