Should the 'Love Is Blind' cast discuss physical appearances while dating? Season 6 takes the debate to the next level.
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Love Is Blind Season 6
If someone asked who your celebrity doppelgänger is, who would you name?
It’s an innocent question, but if you’re a contestant on Netflix’s hit reality TV dating series Love Is Blind, it may be a loaded one too.
On the reality TV dating series, contestants go into “pods,” blocked by a wall, to find a mate. The pods allow potential romantic partners to get to know each other and possibly even fall in love, sight unseen. Once they decide to get engaged, contestants meet face-to-face to "find out if their physical connection matches their strong emotional bond developed in the pods,” according to Netflix.
Throughout the previous five seasons of the show, most contestants appear to have made it a personal rule not to describe their looks to each other, or perhaps that’s how the show is edited.
But some contestants find ways to break that unspoken rule and ask their potential mate leading questions that include height, skin color, celebrity lookalike and sometimes even their weight.
In the first six episodes of Season 6, which premiered on Netflix Feb. 14, participant Jimmy Presnell is torn between two women, Chelsea Blackwell and Jess Vestal. In conversation, Blackwell told Presnell that people say she looks like Megan Fox.
The fallout
While Blackwell admitted that while she didn’t see the comparison to the Jennifer’s Body star, warning Presnell not to “get excited,” her comparison seemed to have encouraged Presnell to make up his mind between the two women.
He then decided to break up with Vestal and choose Blackwell. The pair are currently engaged and dating outside of the pods.
Vestal, who said Presnell ruined her experience on the show, lit into him and hinted that he would regret the decision once he met Blackwell face-to-face.
“When you see and realize what you missed out on, you are going to choke,” she told him. “You are going to need your EpiPen to open up your airways because you are going to be in disbelief of what you missed out on.”
Once Presnell and Blackwell had their reveal, he said she “lied” to him about her looks. But he decided that “at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter,” and joined her on their engagement vacation.
Fans of the show took to X after the episode to weigh in on the events that transpired, as well as Blackwell’s Fox comparison.
One person wrote, “Love is Blind needs to make it an official unbreakable rule that they CANNOT talk about appearances cause you can see the moment Jimmy decided on Chelsea and it was just based on the fact she said she gets she ‘looks’ like Megan Fox.”
“Who lied and told Chelsea from Love is Blind that she looks like Megan Fox,” another added.
The conversation online became so heated that Blackwell herself entered the fray.
In an interview with Access Hollywood on Feb. 17, Blackwell said what producers “didn't show is right before that, [Presnell] was like, ‘Yeah, I look like [NFL player] Christian McCaffrey.'"
"This would be a great time for the people who have ever told me that I resembled [Megan Fox] to come forward please," she said in a Feb. 19 TikTok video. "I'm begging you."
Should contestants lean more into talking about looks?
Presnell, Blackwell and Vestal weren’t the only ones to discuss their appearances this season.
Clay Gravesande almost lost his chance with AD Smith when he talked about how important looks are to him and asked her to describe her appearance.
Kenneth Gorham, who is Black, and Brittany Mills, who is white, openly discussed their races, while dating in the pods and asked each other whether they thought it would be an issue. Ultimately, they both said no.
While the show’s premise is to encourage contestants to get to know each other on a deeper level without seeing the other person, is it so wrong for participants to share about their physical appearances?
Yahoo Entertainment reached out to both Netflix and the production company behind Love Is Blind, Kinetic Content, for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
However, the CEO of Kinetic Content, Chris Coelen, has spoken out on the issue before.
“[Contestants] were never given any instruction on what to say or what not to say or what they could ask about or what they couldn’t ask about. And you see on the show, some people decided to [ask] 'How tall are you, what do you look like?' Other people were like, 'Why would I ever do that? That’s not the point of this,'” Coelen told Variety in 2020, the year the show debuted. “We really wanted it to be their own story, their own journey.”
Experts have said 'attraction matters'
Liv Talley, a dating coach, told Yahoo Entertainment last year that Love Is Blind has “a flawed premise.”
"Attraction matters. The couples who work out only do so because they happened to choose someone that they physically connected with [after they meet in person]. Every couple that meets and doesn't have chemistry breaks up," she told Yahoo Entertainment in October following the Season 5 finale.
Amy Morin, a psychotherapist and author of 13 Things Mentally Strong Couples Don't Do, told Yahoo Entertainment at the time that the show doesn't translate to real life.
"Essentially, successful couples need the three Cs: chemistry, compatibility and commitment," she said. "On the show, couples are able to determine emotional chemistry by talking with one another. But they don't know if they have physical chemistry. Not being attracted to someone doesn't mean someone's shallow. It might just mean that special spark isn't there romantically."
Some say the experiment can work because “you can make judgments about other people based on the sound of their voice, whether you like that voice, their sense of humor, those types of things,” Viren Swami, a professor of social psychology at Anglia Ruskin University in the U.K., told CNBC in 2022.
What’s next?
Love Is Blind episodes 7-9 dropped on Feb. 21, as couples moved out of the pod to dating in the wild.
As for Blackwell and Presnell, they are still together but had several arguments in the latest episodes, especially after Presnell saw on Instagram what his almost-fiancée Vestal looked like.
Netflix isn’t letting fans binge the series all at once. Episodes 10 and 11 will be released on Feb. 28, and the show’s finale airs on March 6.
Love Is Blind Season 6 is streaming on Netflix.
