It wasn’t spiders, snakes or rats that truly terrified I’m a Celeb’s runner-up Emily Atack when she entered the jungle. It was… her makeup fading.
“That was the biggest fear for me,” she says, of her pre-jungle body anxiety, which was exacerbated by social media and saw her relying on apps to slim and perfect her appearance in photos. “Being seen without my straight hair, my makeup or fake tan, being seen without my armour on, that terrified me.”

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That changed, of course, when reality bit as hard as those pesky mozzies.
“I got to day two and the makeup was fading, the hair was going mad in the humidity. I just thought, what can I do about it? If I sit here worrying about it, I’m not going to have a nice experience,” she says, explaining she initially meditated through her anxiety (and hunger) in the camp before the isolation from the outside world began to help her; “In the world we live in today, it’s all about comparing looks on Instagram but we didn’t have any of that in there, so we got to learn beautiful things about each other that weren’t just physical. All the different personalities and characters in there- they became the beautiful things.”
Simple and free acts of self-care to try if you’re feeling anxious
Emily’s journey towards self-love was, therefore, not just thanks to humidity and lack of concealer, but the absence of her phone. Although she (quite rightly) declares John Barrowman her “highlight” of the jungle, her favourite part of the experience was: “In the evening when we all just sat around every evening and chatted for hours,” she reminisces, “There are no phones in there, so all we have is conversation. It is so brilliant to go back to, learning what it is to really get to know someone properly again.”
