Aimee Lou Wood’s distinctive look is turning her into a megastar – proving ‘Instagram face’ isn’t all that

I love your teeth.”

This line, directed at actor Aimee Lou Wood in the latest season of The White Lotus, was surely written specifically for her.

It is, on the face of it, a throwaway comment. Yet it perhaps provides an insight into how Wood beat out thousands of other performers to be cast as Chelsea, a Mancunian yoga teacher-turned-companion to Walton Goggins’s bad-tempered older man, Rick.

Competition to be part of the hand-picked ensemble in Mike White’s critically acclaimed eat-the-rich drama set at a luxury holiday resort is fierce; the previous two seasons have seen newcomers thrust into the spotlight alongside Hollywood heavyweights. Becoming a member of this exclusive club practically guarantees that your career is about to get supercharged (see Leo Woodall and Meghann Fahy).

For Wood, though she’d already been well-received for her role in Netflix’s four series of Sex Education, her turn in White Lotus is likely to launch her into the stratosphere. And, in a world that’s increasingly packed with identikit faces and impossible-to-achieve beauty standards, I couldn’t be happier.

Wood looks, for want of a better word, real. Like the kind of girl you might see on the treadmill at the gym, or waiting for the kettle to boil in the office kitchen, or standing next to you on the train platform while bopping along to the latest Sabrina Carpenter track. She’s slim and pretty, sure, but her face is at once striking and authentic.

This White Lotus teeth compliment is telling because they really are the first thing you’re likely to notice about her. They’re buck teeth, or what might be more affectionately referred to as “bunny teeth”, the top ones prominent and pushing forward over the lowers. The kind of teeth you never, ever see in Hollywood (or, let’s face it, on Love Island), where individuality has been stripped out and replaced by rows upon rows of perfect, straight, bleached veneers devoid of quirk or personality.

But Wood’s swerving of expensive orthodontic work has created her most distinctive, bankable feature, one that is partly to thank for her burgeoning success. Throw in an adorable gap between the two front gnashers, and her smile is utterly disarming. Before she’s even said a word, Wood is an immediately likeable character, someoneto whom you can’t help but warm. It’s what made her such a good fit for Sex Education’s sunny optimist Aimee Gibbs, and equally what puts the viewer on chipper Chelsea’s side right from the jump in The White Lotus.

It’s not just her pearly whites, either: they’re set amid a refreshingly “normal” face, all huge brown eyes, organic-looking brows, uncontoured cheeks, lips that are naturally full but not pumped to the gills with hyaluronic acid, and a forehead that’s mercifully unmarred by filler or Botox. It’s a face that can actually move and, y’know, emote – always a handy attribute for an actor.

This shouldn’t be a remarkable state of affairs, and yet it is: an appearance extraordinary enough to mark out Wood as a unique piece of sea glass in an ocean of Hollywood polish. In truth, it’s so unusual that White Lotus fans have picked up on it, which Wood alluded to in a recent interview with the Hollywood Reporter. She explained how she had turned up on the White Lotus set feeling like an outsider: “I live in my little flat in southeast London, and I’m so British in my sensibility that I wasn’t sure how to handle being around so many people who are so front-footed and confident. All I ever do is take the piss out of myself. Even the way [White Lotus fans] are talking about me and my teeth – that I don’t have veneers or Botox. It feels a bit rebellious.”

This contrast is explored within the show itself. In episode one, the trio of bitchy, infighting girlfriends who are on a “relaxing” retreat together – played exquisitely by Michelle Monaghan, Carrie Coon and Leslie Bibb – talk in code about the cosmetic work they’ve had done. “I haven’t done anything, except for, you know, a little maintenance, the basics,” as Monaghan puts it – the very language indicating that “tweakments” and surgery are now the norm, the standard that all women should be adhering to in order to stay one step ahead of the aging process and remain forever young.

But it’s not just about chasing eternal youth anymore. The real cause for concern is the slow creep of the collective striving for one specific style of beauty. This bland, homogenous “Instagram face”, inspired by a combination of the Kardashians and social media selfie filters, has taught a generation of women we don’t pass muster unaided. We’ve all been brainwashed to believe that we must achieve the same bland aesthetic to be considered attractive: a smooth, expressionless, racially ambiguous face, shiny and unmoving, with defined cheekbones and impossibly plumped, glossy lips. It’s a blank, perfect canvas; it’s a mask devoid of anything so gauche as emotion.

The impact of this social media ideal is stark. Last summer, cosmetic aesthetics doctor Ed Robinson told Sky News that requests for procedures like dermal filler packages had gone up 12-fold after the most recent series of Love Island aired, with very young women making up a large proportion of wannabe clients. “I saw a dramatic increase in younger, mostly women, requesting dermal filler packages, wanting to achieve a Love Island look because they'd seen people on TV,” he said.

In July 2024, a study by Girlguiding, which polled 2,734 girls and young women, found that just over a quarter of girls aged 11-16 and almost half of those aged 17-21 would contemplate cosmetic alterations to their appearance at some point in the next two decades.

The scrutiny of women’s appearances hit headlines again this week, when Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown took to Instagram to lambast the media for tearing her down with headlines such as “Why are Gen-Zers like Millie Bobby Brown ageing so badly?” and “What has Millie Bobby Brown done to her face?”

Thankfully, there is finally some pushback from women in the spotlight. Meghan Trainor has recently been vocal about how much she regrets getting Botox after finding that she “cannot smile anymore”. Former Love Island contestant Malin Andersson has been outspoken about her belief that cosmetic surgery can become an addiction, saying: “I started to develop more body dysmorphia. I’d look in the mirror, see my lips, I think they weren’t big enough. And then I kept repeating it, kept going back for more.”

Meanwhile, The Last Showgirl actor Pamela Anderson has been praised for her gorgeous, natural look after showing off a completely makeup-free face for the last five years. Again, this shouldn’t be a radical act, yet somehow it is; Anderson has had to explain her choice, saying that makeup “doesn’t really make sense” for her anymore and that going without it feels “freeing, and fun, and a little rebellious”.

It’s notable that Wood used that same word to describe simply daring to keep her God-given face as it is: rebellious. It seems that accepting ourselves as we are and not adhering to external pressures to look like everybody else is the ultimate act of defiance for a woman in 2025.

And it might just be our secret weapon. As Wood puts it: “I spent a lot of my life worrying about being weird. And now I’m realising it could be my superpower.”