I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here contestant GK Barry has revealed she was nervous to appear on television due to her appearance.
The 26-year-old social media star, who rose to fame after garnering millions of views on her TikTok videos during the pandemic, suffered with chronic acne before appearing on the show.
“I was pretty nervous,” Barry, real name Grace Keeling, said of appearing on the ITV reality show. “My acne was bad then and I thought viewers would be going, ‘Oh my God, look at her skin.’”
Although acne is most common in adolescence, around five per cent of women and one per cent of men experience the skin condition over the age of 25, according to the NHS.
Barry said, despite her fears about I’m a Celeb viewers judging her looks, people actually came up and thanked her for normalising the condition after she left the programme.
“Afterwards mums would come up and thank me for normalising acne for their teenage daughters. I do love mums,” the social media star, who now has over 1.3million followers online, told The Times.
The content creator added: “People on TV can be sniffy about social media and nobody over the age of 30 knew who I was, so I was sure I’d be voted out first.” Barry came fifth in the competition: “Better than I expected,” she said of the impressive result.
The star was beaten only by Strictly’s Oti Mabuse, Reverend Richard Coles, Coleen Rooney and McFly singer Danny Jones, who was crowned King of the Jungle.
After being eliminated from the series, Barry told jungle host Ant McPartlin that participating had been “so much worse” than what she expected.
“It was so difficult. I thought it would just be tanning, having a good time, a couple of trials,” she said. “That was hell. I wouldn’t put my worst enemy through that.”
She continued: “I am starving, I am tired, I have lost any sort of anything that I did have on my body but the people in there were amazing so it made it great.”
