Ariana Madix Reveals Which Vanderpump Rules Costar Got Her the Most Memorable Holiday Gift (Exclusive)

Ariana Madix appreciates a good holiday gift — especially one that helps keep her safe.

The Vanderpump Rules alum, 39, tells PEOPLE that her longtime friend and costar Scheana Shay once gifted her a snowboard helmet, which she deemed one of her most memorable items.

“Helmets are important,” Madix says. “Everyone should be wearing helmets, whether they’re snowboarding, skiing, riding horses, riding motorcycles.”

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But Madix explains, “I have a small head, so sometimes when you go get rentals for things, it’s hard. I have to try on kid-size helmets.”

The Love Island USA host said that Shay got her her own helmet, and it “was great because we were going on a snow trip soon after that, and I was able to not only look cute because it’s pink, but be safe.”

Madix and Shay have been friends since Vanderpump Rules debuted in 2013, when Shay worked as a waitress and Madix as a bartender at Lisa Vanderpump’s restaurant, SUR. Throughout the 11 seasons, the pair have remained close to one another as they went through breakups, shifts in the group’s dynamic and expanding their careers outside of SUR.

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As for Madix’s gift-giving skills, she tells PEOPLE while discussing her new holiday edit partnership with DSW, “Every time there’s gift-giving happening, I’m super stressed.” 

“I am not so good at it. I try and I get really lofty big ideas about gifts, and then I overthink and then if one part of it doesn’t work out I get really stressed,” she explains. “Then the day is coming up and I end up just freaking out and getting something that’s not quite what I wanted.”

She confesses that when she’s preparing to give gifts to her boyfriend, Daniel Wai, she likes to create a note folder on her phone to jot down ideas when Wai says he “likes something or that he would get this if he didn’t want to spend on it for himself.” 

“I have a little list there that I’ll be going off of and collecting things from,” she says. But despite her diligence, “he’s the gift-giver.”

“He already knows what he wants to get. He’s already gotten me, I think, most of it,” she says, calling him “the best gift-giver I’ve ever met in my life.”

Madix and Wai, a fitness influencer, were first linked in April 2023, a month after Madix learned that her longtime boyfriend, Tom Sandoval, was cheating with their Vanderpump Rules costar Rachel “Raquel” Leviss. In April, Madix and Wai were spotted spending time together at Coachella, and by the next month, a source told PEOPLE that the reality star was already “falling in love” with Wai.