Actress of the moment, Aimee Lou Wood, is being heralded as a radical because she has not had her teeth done. In Hollywood and an online culture of face tuning, veneers, ‘Instagram face’, Botox, Ozempic and unrelenting judgement, for a famous woman to embrace and dare to love their natural features is an act of rebellion. It shouldn’t be, but it is.
Wood first broke onto our screens in 2019 with her BAFTA-winning performance as Aimee Gibbs in Sex Education, and since then she has gone on to star in Living, Toxic Town, Daddy Issues and Uncle Vanya on stage. She has recently broken America too with her turn as Chelsea in season three of The White Lotus, currently boasting more than 2 million followers on Instagram. Aside from her affable personality, her comedy credentials and her undeniable charisma, conversation around Wood always resorts back to the same thing – her teeth.
In fact, her teeth have sparked a series of articles about ‘wonky British teeth’ becoming ‘Hollywood’s new status symbol’, ‘the novelty of a natural smile’ and how hers ‘aren’t just charming – they’re inspiring’.
The intentions behind all this insane discourse might be celebratory, but it reads as extremely condescending. It’s almost as if Wood’s White Lotus co-star Charlotte Le Bon anticipated the viral reaction her teeth would have because in episode two her character Chloe says to Wood’s character Chelsea, ‘I love your teeth. You’re from England, right?’ and apparently the line was improvised.
Even Stephen Fry couldn’t help but bring them up with Wood on The Jonathan Ross Show last week, saying he had read an article about her pearly whites in Vanity Fair. ‘You’ve obviously made an enormous number of people happy by not changing your teeth,’ he said. ‘You know, they’re notable, like my bent nose. You obviously had a time when some people would have told you, “Oh you should get those corrected”, but you stood up for them.’
Ever the good sport, Wood joked, ‘I can’t believe the impact my teeth are having’, as the audience cheered and applauded. ‘The Americans can’t believe it,’ she explained. ‘They’re all being lovely, but these videos just come up on my Instagram of these orthodontists analysing my teeth.’
‘They dissect my teeth and say what’s wrong with them, but then at the end they go “but we don’t think she should change a thing”.’ The actress laughed, ‘It’s a real full circle moment after being bullied about my teeth forever and now people are clapping in an audience because I’ve got these gnashers.’
At this point, it would be remiss not to confirm that Wood has great teeth – distinctive teeth. Teeth that add value to her face, set her apart from other people and ones she would look entirely different without. But the collective fascination, nay obsession, with her set speaks to a wider cultural issue regarding modern beauty standards.
Let’s be honest, it’s 2025 and we’re not far off Wood receiving a standing ovation for not having veneers. What does that tell us about the current state of play? As Emma Dickson, an actor and medical aesthetician who has a gap between her front teeth, told The New York Times, Wood’s teeth are a ‘comforting’ antidote to Hollywood’s usual ‘copy-and-paste smile’.
‘I feel like in the beginning of the Real Housewives franchise and Keeping Up With the Kardashians, there was this fascination with the most bleached tooth you could have,’ added Sarah Hahn, a prosthodontist from California who analyses celebrity teeth on TikTok. ‘You could name off a million celebrities and they were all getting veneers.’
Wood serves as a reminder of just how rare it is to see a ‘natural smile’ on TV these days. In the UK at least, sparkling white, perfectly shaped teeth used to be reserved for TOWIE stars and Hollywood A-listers, now they are all we tend to see. In the past decade, the expectation of a perfect smile trickled down from megastars to influencers and micro-celebrities and eventually found itself making ordinary people feel bad about themselves. You don’t have to spend long on social media before coming across an offer for Invisalign, teeth whitening services or a tips from a ‘medical professional’ on how to get the perfect smile.
In that context – and context always matters – I suppose it’s true that Wood is breaking new ground by carving out a career in an industry that so often tells us that only perfect teeth will pass.
She is certainly embracing her new status as a tooth icon with good humour, which incidentally makes her even more iconic, but Wood has also spoken openly about how she used to be bullied about them. Regardless of whether she is ‘in’ on the conversation, or joke, or not, imagine having strangers feverishly dissect something you were once insecure about on such a vast scale?
‘These people live in Hollywood,’ Wood said of her castmates in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, most of whom, it must be said, have ‘a Hollywood smile’. ‘I live in my little flat in South East London, and I’m so British in my sensibility that I wasn’t sure how to handle being around so many people who are front-footed and confident. All I ever do is take the piss out of myself.’ When asked about her teeth, something she must come to expect in every interview, Wood said ‘that I don’t have veneers or Botox – it feels a bit rebellious’.
Sure, in the current landscape of homogenous, unattainable beauty norms, Wood is challenging the status quo and moving the needle by having her natural teeth on screen. But wouldn’t it be great if they were just normal? So normal, in fact, that people could simply praise her acting and tell her she looks great without her teeth turning into a viral phenomenon. Something to chew on, anyway...
Nikki Peach is a writer at Grazia UK, working across pop culture, TV and news. She has also written for the i, i-D and the New Statesman Media Group and covers all things TV for Grazia (treating high and lowbrow shows with equal respect).