From SNL Mockery to Ozempic culture: Why White Lotus Season 3 star Aimee Lou Wood’s teeth gap sparked outrage

Dubai: We don’t deserve Aimee Lou Wood, the endearing star from the hit show White Lotus Season 3.

Not when we, as a culture, still flinch at the sight of anything that doesn’t come Botoxed, filtered, or surgically altered. The British actress showed up on our screens not “salon-perfect,” but beautifully, jarringly real—complete with her unapologetic gaping teeth, expressive face, and zero interest in fitting the Hollywood mold.

And what did she get in return? A Saturday Night Live sketch that mocked her with exaggerated prosthetic teeth and a tired accent, punching down instead of up. But this isn’t about her teeth. It’s about our minds.

We’ve been so conditioned to accept a narrow, artificial definition of beauty that anything outside it—especially when it comes from a woman—is seen as fair game for ridicule.

Aimee Lou Wood made people uncomfortable not because of how she looked, but because of how comfortable she was in that look. She disrupted a system that thrives on insecurities by refusing to hide hers.

We now live in a world where being on Ozempic, Wegovy, or Mounjaro is spoken about as casually as taking vitamins. We’ve normalised medicating our bodies to shrink them, as if it's the price of admission to modern society. People praise celebrities for their "discipline" when it's really just access to prescriptions. That’s okay, apparently. But Aimee’s natural teeth? That rattles everyone.

To her credit, Wood didn’t stay silent. She called out the sketch for being “mean and unfunny,” adding that she’s happy to be parodied “when it’s clever and in good spirits”—but this wasn’t that.

She rightly pointed out that while the rest of the sketch aimed upwards, her character was the only one targeted for appearance. She wasn’t thin-skinned. She was sharp, thoughtful, and right.

She didn’t attack the actress portraying her. Instead, she questioned the lazy, dated humour that still thinks mocking a woman’s smile is edgy comedy. She respected accuracy—even if it was harsh—but not cheap shots. She also asked a valid question: Would we be talking about this if it were a man?

That discomfort with keeping it real isn't new. I remember when Julia Roberts turned up on a red carpet in the ’90s with her armpits unshaven. It wasn’t a scandal—it was just hair. But it sent everyone into a tizzy. Why? Because she dared to show up in a body that hadn’t been edited, waxed, or tweaked for mass approval. Just like Aimee now, Julia challenged the illusion—and the illusion didn’t like it.

In a world obsessed with thigh gaps, poreless skin, prescription weight loss, and TikTok face filters, Aimee Lou Wood is the much-need disruptor and celebrity clutter-breaker. And maybe that’s what we find so threatening. She refuses to be edited. She refuses to shrink herself to fit the box we’ve built for women in the public eye.

We need more like her. Our girls and boys deserve to see faces like Aimee’s on their screens—faces that remind them it’s okay not to be perfect, not to have straight teeth or a thigh gap. Because the problem was never with her smile. It was with our warped reflection on expecting perfection.

Plus, you can’t penalise a woman for how she looks—nor should you place your idea of perfection on her. Aimee pushing back is exactly what we needed.