The Women of Love Island USA Season 8 Are '10 Toes Down' For Each Other
At the end of a hard day's photo shoot and interview, Love Island USA’s season-eight men Bryce Alakai and Zach Georgiou—who had spent the day thrifting together—were a sight for sore eyes for the final four women of the cycle: Trinity Tatum, Kayda Bosse, Aniya Harvey, and Melanie Moreno.
But this season, like many recent Love Island USA seasons, has been all about the girls—the female friendships, the unique battles the women are up against in the public eye, and the way they band together when things get tough. Some might say the show is chasing the high of PPG—the friendship trio of Leah Kateb, Serena Page, and JaNa Craig from season six—but it's also simply true that, in the chaotic, dramatic Love Island villa, where your every move is filmed and you wear a bikini for 16 hours a day, sometimes the best solace is your girls.
For some, this friendship chemistry was immediate. “I was just like, ‘Okay, my fellow Black queen,’” Aniya says of seeing Trinity (who won the season with her boyfriend, Bryce) for the first time. “I was like, ‘Okay, cuzzie.’” Trinity echoes, “My cuzzie.”
Other friendships grew over time, as the weeks progressed in the villa, and they began to learn each other’s mannerisms and habits. Soon they were squabbling and stealing each other’s beauty products, like sisters. “We would wait for one of us to walk out the room and then we'd dig in the drawers,” Trinity recalls. Often they would nab a spray of Kayda’s perfumes. “And I'd know,” Kayda quips. “I could smell it on you guys.”
Below, Love Island USA season eight cast members Trinity, Kayda, Aniya, and Melanie sit down with Teen Vogue to answer your burning questions about villa life and where their romances are now.
Kayda (green outfit) wears Laruicci silver bracelets.
Aniya: Getting ready so fast, I feel like.
Trinity: Not even that. Well, yeah, for you. But the microphone.
Aniya: Well, I was ready the quickest.
Kayda: I know. I was going to say.
Trinity: We were always ready.
Kayda: You were so quick.
Aniya: But I still feel like the timeframe of getting ready, like: "Okay, wake up. [Get into] makeup."
Kayda: Yeah, that's what I had to adjust to. I used to take three hours to get ready. Now I could do it in 30 minutes.
Melanie: Mine was the time—not knowing the time or the date. It kind of put you in this weird place. It's like you could be up at four in the morning and you don't know. In your head, it's like, "Oh, it's 10:00 p.m."
Trinity: Yeah. It felt like being a Sim, legit. Okay, you got the people around you, they know the time, they know the date, they know what's going on in the world—
Kayda: Literally.
Trinity: —and you don't know nothing. And then they're like, "Oh, yeah…"
Melanie: Like, "We're all Fiji time."
Trinity: I don't know what time it is.
Group: Fiji time.
Melanie: And [not] talking to our family, I think, because we would get very emotional in there. You think you know what you're getting yourself into, and then you get there and it's the complete opposite. Not having that support of your family, I think that's why we relied on each other so much.
Aniya: I agree. I feel like that definitely helped grow our bonds with one another. We all missed our family. We would talk about it all the time.
Trinity: And we're all sisters. I think that's why we understood that, like, we could argue right now, but we're going to get over it in 5, 10 minutes.
Melanie: And we would argue.
Aniya: We did.
Melanie: Every day.
Aniya: Every day it was something else.
Melanie: And then two minutes later, "Can you put this oil on me?"
Trinity: She's like, "Can you flatiron the back of my head?"
Kayda: Oh.
Melanie: Wearing black! [Gestures to Kayda]
Aniya: [Kayda] always tried to take black. You know what we had to do? We had to assign days of who could wear black and who could wear white.
Melanie: And she always picked black.
Aniya: Every day. It's like she didn't pack any other colors than black.
Trinity: She didn’t. I seen that closet.
Aniya: It was black everything. It was black-and-white everything.
Kayda: Yeah, that definitely was me.
Aniya: Yes. What was another argument?
Trinity: When we listened to the music.
Aniya: Oh, I will never forget. I will never forget.
Trinity: It was an off day, and we was playing music…
Aniya: No, no, no. It was so bad.
Trinity: I was playing rap music, right? And then she started playing her music, which—I hate her taste in music.
Kayda: It's country music.
Trinity: I can't do no country. Aniya wanted to play something next in the queue. So I grabbed the speaker, and I think one of the producers was talking or we were talking about something, so I turned it down, and she got so mad. She's like, "You always want to turn down my music!”
Aniya: Her face turned red.
Trinity: She went red. Titty popped out in the beginning.
Aniya: Titty popped out, nipples hard as sh*t. I was like, "This bitch is mad as f*ck."
Trinity: She was so mad. I never seen her turn that red.
Kayda: And then I said, "We're not listening to music." And I [turned it off].
[The group exclaims while laughing.]
Aniya: She's so petty. You're so petty. I was like, "Bro, why are we arguing about this?" Every time y'all argued, I was like, "Why are we arguing?"
Trinity: We're screaming-match arguing, and why are we doing that? [Aniya’s] in the corner just like, "Y'all are stressing me out." So, like, monotone. But literally, Kayda took the speakers, like, "We're not listening to anything." She turned it off.
And then we started laughing about it, like, 10 seconds later.
Kayda: I feel like we [addressing Trinity] were always together in there because Zach and Bryce were besties, and then we sat right next to each other getting ready. So we were always just next to each other.
Trinity: We were.
Kayda: It just happens.
Trinity: It happens.
Kayda: Exactly.
Trinity: It is.
Kayda: It really was.
Melanie: We talked to each other like sisters so much that we actually got in trouble.
Aniya: Yes we did.
Kayda: The producers had to come in.
Melanie: They thought that we were arguing.
Aniya: They thought we hated each other because we would just go off on each other.
Trinity: We would go in like how sisters argue.
Melanie: We'd literally be joking, though, and they would come and be like, "Guys, what's going on? We can't talk to each other [like that]." I'm like, "We're literally joking. We grew up talking to our siblings like that, that's why we talk to each other like that.”
Teen Vogue: That is so cute.
Melanie: We still talk to each other like that.
Trinity: Even when we were doing the reunion and I was like, "You always sitting down first."
Kayda: Oh, yeah.
Trinity: And the girl was like, "Be nice to each other."
Kayda: We were like, “No, it's okay. It's okay.”
Trinity: In the beginning, I'm not going to lie, I did not trust Corbin.
Kayda: None of us did.
Trinity: There was something shady about this dude because he was literally so ChatGPT. His conversation seemed calculated.
Aniya: He put such a fake persona on. He's so goofy. If you actually know him, he's really a goofball, but I do feel like he tried to portray himself very...
Trinity: Not saying he's not sophisticated, but he was trying to give brick wall.
Aniya: Yeah, and I was like, "Bro, you are literally the goofiest guy."
Trinity: So then when we got to know him—you got more comfortable with everybody—and I was like, "Yo, he is the most non-serious person ever." But he can take accountability.
Kayda: He can.
Aniya: He can.
Kayda: I will give it to him. He's a cool guy.
Melanie: I think you can't really do that because then you would be playing a persona, and in there you have to be yourself, or you kind of go crazy trying to keep up with that persona. When I went into it, I was just like, "I want a friend." And then I ended up with so many. But I was like, "I just want one friend and I'll survive this."
Kayda: I agree. That's what I was thinking too. But as a bombshell, I definitely was like, "I need to come in with confidence. I don't know what I'm walking into, who I'm walking into." So that was a big thing for me.
Melanie: And you were the bombshell.
Trinity: You were—OG.
Aniya: Yeah, OG bombshell.
Melanie: She came in wearing colored eyes. I was like, "F*ck that bitch!"
Trinity: Came in with two men on her arm.
Aniya: Exactly. I'm like, "Dang."
Trinity: Man on my arm, no man on yours.
Melanie: And then me and her have such similar personalities, and that's why we clicked.
Kayda: But we did not click right away.
Melanie: We didn't. It's because, bae, you took my front man. She wasn't—
Trinity: Bro, she knew that man for 42 hours.
Melanie: I know, I know.
Kayda: It wasn't even 40, it was like 24 at that point.
Aniya: No, but it felt so long being there.
Melanie: It was, like, 18 hours…
Aniya: ...being here, you don't understand, being here, it feels like a week.
Melanie: One day felt like 10 days.
Kayda: He straight-up told her, "You are not my type."
Trinity: He did. He did.
Aniya: He did.
Melanie: And then his type just walked in, and she looked at me—
Trinity: She said if he looked then he took.
Kayda: If he looked then he took.
Aniya: That is true.
Teen Vogue: You know what? It played out the way it was supposed to play out.
Melanie: Literally.
Kayda: It really did.
Trinity: And that's okay.
Melanie: You got your English man.
Trinity: English breakfast.
Trinity: I think for us, we have such a good support system with friends and family, and I think we've always—even when we was inside of there—we were like, “We know what really went down. We know what's going on.” Everybody's going to have an opinion on you, your friendship, your relationship. People still think me and Bryce are faking our relationship. I don't even know how that became a thing.
I'll just say that, honestly, people are going to be haters on social media. They're always either 13 or, like, old bot accounts. There's no in-between. So you kind of have to not pay that attention, when you can't even see their face! Every time you click their account, it's always saying, follow back. Or it's just, like, God is in their bio. They're just not genuine, happy people, because they're not going by what they believe in. So I pay it dust, and I'm very mentally strong.
Kayda: I also think just having each other really saved us. Because if I didn't walk out with friends as great as you guys are, the boys, I would've been in my bed right now.
Melanie: It's crazy, because we actually said it in the villa. We were like, “No matter what people think of us, no matter what kind of narrative they put on us, at least we have each other, and at least we know the truth.” We said it all the time in the villa because we knew we were probably going to come out to some chaos. And it's like we did exactly what we said—we've been 10 toes down for each other since the moment we left the villa.
Aniya: Yeah, I agree.
Trinity: There's even been times people try to pair me and Aniya against each other, and I'm like, “Are you dead serious?”
Melanie: They have their fights on Twitter.
Kayda: Literally, they're going back and forth in the comments, I'm like, “Y'all.”
Aniya: I'm like, “Please, not my cousin.”
Trinity: Mind you, I'm just with this girl like two hours ago. Y'all over here trying to make the narrative.