If there’s one word that’s following Jasmine Muller through this season of Love Island, it’s “baddie” – and it’s one she’s claimed for herself. Said with her trademark confidence early in the villa, it caught on almost instantly with the public, spreading across TikTok and becoming something of a tagline in each episode (and now something we all want to be). But for anyone who spent their childhood in Dubai during the 1990s and early 2000s – or who, like Jasmine, is Indian and Dutch, multinational, and knows what it’s like growing up in the diaspora or belonging to more than one place at once – there’s another layer to the story.
Jasmine, 27, was born in Sharjah and raised in Dubai before relocating to London, where she now runs the fashion label, Mahila Intimates, with her sister, Bella. She has, over the past few years, built a substantial following across TikTok and Instagram – for her vegan food content, style, and a presence that friends describe as magnetic long before any of this was televised.
Dubai and Love Island have circled each other for years. Contestants holiday there, relocate there, rebrand there once the show ends – the city has become shorthand for a post-villa reinvention. Jasmine’s relationship to the place predates all of that, and in the best way possible.
Her mother, Husna, moved to the UAE in 1990 to work as cabin crew for Emirates, landing in a city that bears almost no resemblance to the one occupying global headlines today.
“Dubai was so different in the ’90s,” she says. “When I moved there, only a couple of hotels existed, no skyscrapers. Sheikh Zayed Road was a dual carriageway with dirt roads when you came off onto Jumeirah Beach. There were only three small malls – Bur Juman, Jumeirah Plaza, Al Ghurair Centre – no comparison to the malls in Dubai now.”
She also remembers how little the rest of the world understood about where she’d landed. Not long after completing her training, she was operating a flight with a layover in London and met up with friends for a drink. “They asked me, ‘So did you go to training school on a camel?’ No one then knew where Dubai was – they thought it was just desert.”
Jasmine and Bella grew up in Al Wasl, in an area of Arabic-style villas where their mother says, “the language and culture are very prominent.” At school, both girls studied Arabic and attended Islamic studies as part of their curriculum – an education that, alongside summers in London and annual skiing trips with their Danish family until they were teenagers, shaped a childhood split between worlds without ever feeling like a contradiction. “I believe school really moulds the way you feel and sets your mindset,” Husna says. “It was also all they knew.”
Mouna, who has been one of Jasmine’s closest friends since they were both ten years old, describes a childhood defined less by glamour than by a kind of insulated freedom.
Image: Supplied
“People misunderstand that growing up in Dubai was really wholesome in so many ways,” she says. “It’s a tiny place with so many people from all over the world. We were sheltered in so many levels – good and bad (IYKYK) – but there was an overall feeling of safety that gave us a lot of freedom as kids. The communities were small, and everyone sort of knew each other. In a way, it felt like being raised in a little village.”
There’s a detail Mouna returns to that says something specific about growing up there in that era – the lag. “Dubai is funny, because at the time it was pretty isolated from the world in a lot of ways,” she says. “We were at a crossroads – in this very modern, developing place, but we got a lot of the Western trends months, if not years, later. I think that allowed us as kids to create a pretty authentic sense of being and style, and Jasmine was always a great example of that.”
Of Jasmine specifically, Mouna’s memories run deep. “Jasmine and I were best friends pretty much from when we met at ten,” she says. Even then, she says, Jasmine had a quality that didn’t need amplifying. “She was never the loudest or craziest girl in the room, but she always had this massive, natural pull. She had the balance of being gorgeous and smart but also so kind, and it genuinely perplexed people – friends would get jealous and almost couldn’t process that you could be all of those things at once.”
Style was part of that too. “We look back now and laugh at how we dressed, but at the time, there was no doubt Jasmine had the coolest personal sense of style – she loved experimenting with her makeup and hair. As we got older she was kind of indie and grungy, plaid and frilly socks, while also loving Drake and being a total YouTube and thirst-trap-internet-guy fangirl,” Mouna laughs. “She had so much dimension. She could be so many things at once.”
Part of what makes Jasmine’s story resonate beyond Dubai is the layered heritage and upbringing she carries with her – a mix that, in much of the UK press coverage, has been treated as a fun fact or curiosity. But for the wide diaspora of young people who grew up similarly mixed in cities like Dubai, it’s familiar territory: an identity assembled from multiple places, languages and traditions at once – Indian and Dutch heritage, Arabic studies during the school week, a Danish family on the ski slopes each winter, London in the summer – none of which fully explain the others, all of which are true simultaneously.
It’s a dynamic that’s become increasingly visible online, where audiences – particularly young South Asians – have responded to Jasmine’s presence with a kind of recognition that goes beyond reality TV fandom. On TikTok and Instagram, fans have started recreating her looks through their own lens: South Asian creators posting “Jasmine-inspired” desi makeup tutorials, others styling outfits around traditional Indian jewellery and gold pieces in a nod to her heritage.
It’s a small but telling shift – young South Asian girls and boys watching someone who shares their background being celebrated on a mainstream British show, and in turn making that part of their identity feel cool, current and visible in a way it hasn’t always been allowed to be.
For many, watching someone who carries that same layered background walk into one of the biggest shows in British television and simply be themselves, without flattening any part of it for easier consumption, feels like genuine representation.
Jasmine’s confidence and her famously high standards have become one of the most talked-about parts of her time in the villa – and one of the most celebrated. Her sister Bella, and their mother, both trace it back to the same source.
“Life hasn’t been the easiest,” Husna reflects. “I grew up with a strong mother myself, which made me very independent, and I think those are the tools I brought to the girls’ lives. It was hard, balancing work and being a mum, and the girls had to navigate their relationship with a step-mother, a half-sister and their father, on top of the social settings of Dubai. We all had to be strong – to float above the water, and then swim.”
Bella sees the result of that directly in her sister. “She’s always been so strong-minded, with amazing willpower,” she says. “I think it comes from our close relationship with our mum, and seeing how resilient she was as a single parent raising two girls. She’s always taught us to have respect for ourselves, and to back ourselves even if no one else does.”
On the question of standards specifically, Bella adds: “Growing up in Dubai definitely showed us the finer things in life – but we’ve also seen how quickly that can be lost or taken away. It’s not that we’re used to just living this bougie lifestyle, it’s learning how hard you have to work to get there, and how important it is to protect and cherish what you have. Having high standards is just Jasmine protecting everything she’s worked for and everything she deserves.”
Strip away the headlines, and the people closest to Jasmine describe someone whose reputation runs even deeper than her on-screen presence suggests – and, in some cases, looks nothing like it at all.
“I think people will be most surprised to learn how funny and silly she is,” Bella says. “She’s the jokester in our friendship group, a total prankster – you’d never guess that from her social media.”
Her mother offers a memory that, for her, captures Jasmine’s spirit perfectly. When Jasmine was five, Husna took her to a clinic for a blood test without warning her beforehand. “During the consultation, the doctor mentioned it, and she said, ‘No, I’m not doing that’ – and ran out of the room, down the corridor, into the lift and out onto the street. When I caught up with her, she told me she wasn’t taking the test, and I knew it was a battle I wasn’t going to win. So we left.” Husna laughs telling it now. “I never wanted to take that strong spirit away from her, or break it.”
Mouna remembers a different side. “I always tell her that she taught me how to be kind,” she says. “I remember being maybe twelve, watching the way she interacted with people, and thinking – wow, that’s inspiring. Even at that age, when we were all catty and bratty, she always led with kindness and empathy. She just has the hugest heart.”
It’s this combination – visible confidence paired with something much softer underneath, and a sense of humour her followers rarely see – that friends say has earned Jasmine a reputation as a “woman’s woman” long before Love Island gave her a platform. As Bella puts it: “She’s the mother and caretaker in all her relationships. So many people rely on her for advice and guidance – family, friends, partners. She’s really got her head screwed on.”
For those who grew up alongside her, Jasmine’s run on Love Island carries a weight that has little to do with the show itself.
“She’s absolutely eating it up,” Mouna says. “Anyone who knows Jasmine is feeling extremely proud right now. Growing up in Dubai, a lot of us felt a little isolated from the rest of the world, so it’s always a pleasant shock to see someone you grew up with succeed on such a global scale.”
Her mother sees it more simply still. “I am, and have always been, so proud of Jasmine,” Husna says. “She’s such an amazing daughter, sister, cousin, friend and granddaughter – and woman. All of her accomplishments along the way fill my heart with joy. Her saying she’s from Dubai is just her stating a fact of where she grew up.”
For Bella, though, Jasmine ends up representing something bigger than herself this season, “women,” she says. “She’s such a big feminist and activist when it comes to women’s rights. She just wants to see women win – she wants women to run the world, honestly. And if anyone can get us there, it’s Jasmine.”