At Home with Emily and Aimee Lou Wood
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Coming of age, women who are now in their twenties had a turbulent ride when it came to representation on TV, film, and in magazines. Many of us grew up watching The O.C, The Hills and The Simple Life, while reading trashy magazines peddling the ‘lollipop head’ described the starlets of the aforementioned shows. Size 0 was what we were told to all strive for, despite the fact many of these celebrities were clearly unwell. Teen magazines told us what not to wear, what makeup boys hated, and how to enter the world as an acceptable vision of womanhood. In the midst of this, two sisters, Aimee Lou and Emily Wood, were growing up in a sleepy village tucked in the heart of Stockport, Manchester. Spending their days scribbling on each other’s dolls heads, executing pranks, and daydreaming of playing a more positive role in the world they saw largely only through their TV screens and in the pages of publications.
Fast forward to 2020, and the sisters' lives have transformed into something that would be beyond their wildest imaginations during childhood. Aimee now stars as Aimee Gibbs in Netflix’s revolutionary teen show Sex Education, with Emily pursuing a career in makeup artistry. Living together in London, the pair watch each other achieving the goals they used to act out as infants playing make believe. With only a three-year age gap — Aimee is 26, and Emily 23 — the sisters are thick as thieves. Logging onto Zoom and chatting with me from across London while in lockdown, they finish each other's sentences, have near exactly the same voices, and both bear the signature buck teeth that have made Aimee’s on-screen alter ego an instant icon.
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Fresh from recording the two makeup tutorials seen alongside this profile, the two begin our conversation by waxing lyrical about beauty, role models, and the archetypes of the teen media world we all grew up with. Emily begins, “makeup originally served to make me look better, and to look prettier. I was viewing myself and judging myself through the male gaze; because that’s what we were brought up with, and surrounded by in magazines, films, TV, and in the place that we lived in.” Both describe the area they grew up in as conventional and slightly archaic; a pocket of the country in which the now-liberal lives they lead in London seem impossible to actualise.
Aimee echoes her sister, “when we were younger, it was like, let’s make ourselves look more socially acceptable. Let’s hide any flaws or imperfections, and let’s look conventional and digestible.” Like a classic 80’s movie, the girls were living in a makeover scene, attempting to use concealer, foundation, and eyeshadow to transform into forms more desirable.
“I had an eating disorder when I was younger,” Aimee says, “and I think probably a component of it was what I was exposed to. The heroin chic trend, and people being super skinny. That was the cool thing. The size zero stuff — that fuelled it.” Now, the pair find themselves at the epicentres of the industries that once made them insecure. Emily works as an editorial makeup artist; her job is quite literally defining what beauty is. Aimee has become a household name on one of Netflix’s biggest shows, playing a character who has changed the conversation around sexual assault and destigmatised masturbation for generations.
“We’ve kind of along the way taught ourselves that there’s only one way to look good, and actually, I do feel like there’s a massive shift against that at the moment — which makes me happy,” Aimee tells me. Sex Education is a far cry from the teen representation we’ve previously seen on our screens. While films and TV shows aimed at those coming of age have always sought to represent the outcasts, the weirdos, and the kids from the wrong side of the track, classics of the genre now seem at best unrepresentative, at worst majorly problematic. While many of us still hold a soft spot in our heart for the John Hughes classics, or obsessively rewatch Gossip Girl, the teen genre up until Sex Education was largely made up of conventionally beautiful people. No matter how fucked-up the protagonists lives are, their perfectly curated wardrobes, figure, and social circle were still preferable to your own reality as an adolescent. Sex Education, on the other hand, comes from, as Aimee describes, a place of empathy. “What I always think about Sex Education is that it’s so rooted in love and compassion. There’s such a unity in Sex Education because we’re all struggling, so why don’t we figure this out together?” The show replaces clique rivalry with a level playing field; each character has their own shit to deal with, despite their social status. “It’s not that they learn so much about themselves by going into themselves and reflecting on everything that they’ve been through; they learn about themselves because they experience each other.”
This idea of learning and growing with each other echoes the way in which Aimee and Emily have always pulled strength from one another. While it would be easy to look at the sisters and assume some sort of unattainable overnight success, both struggled with figuring themselves out. “I left college at 18, and I was like fuck, all my friends have gone to uni, I feel quite stuck and lost. I had a boyfriend and was obsessed with him. It was very codependent,” explains Emily. Aimee had already moved to London for drama school: “I was living this complete opposite life where I had met all these like-minded people. I’d always felt like a freak, and then I met all my people and I felt this huge sense of belonging and liberation.” She turns and speaks directly to her sister, “I thought, Em, you need to get your arse down to London hun, because the reason why I think you’re feeling so stifled is because you were just restricted. You were trying to fit into a place that just wasn’t you. You managed to pretend for a very long time that it was.”
While moving in together in London signalled the beginning of their adult lives, neither of them became established in their careers overnight. Reading the press surrounding Aimee and her role in Sex Education, you’d be forgiven if you believed she rolled off a bus from Manchester and landed her pivotal role in the show. As always, the reality isn’t so simple. “I was having a bit of a wobbly just before I got Sex Ed. I’d just had a string of three months — I know people have that for years, but they’re tougher than I am — of just getting no after no after no. It was ridiculous. I remember something just clicking in my head where I went, fuck it, I’m just going to try and get this part.”
As they’ve grown up, their approach to beauty is one built on mutual admiration. While Aimee’s teeth, thick northern accent, and willingness to champion ‘taboo’ subjects has changed how the ‘pretty, popular’ girl in high school should look, sound, and behave; Emily pioneers beauty as a form of self expression — not restriction. “Now I’m at a place where I can enjoy it rather than feel like it’s a necessity.” Recently coming out as queer, and immersing herself in the queer community, she credits opening up that part of herself as “unlocking a confidence and an unapologetic approach to the world.” Emily explains, “if I want to go out with glitter all over my face, I will. Makeup goes hand-in-hand with that feeling. I allowed it to tone down my individuality by doing looks that everyone else was doing, whereas now it’s about expressing myself through makeup which makes me more individual. Now, I’m not trying to mute my individuality”.
They aren’t the only ones changing. The impact of their work ripples far behind the city the sisters now live in, and the quiet town they grew up in is evolving along with them. “Mum has evolved so much. I moved to London and she had no choice, because Mum only has us two,” Emily tells me. “She has devoted her entire existence since we were born to being a mum. Providing for us emotionally, everything. She’s incredible and has thrived as a single parent.”
While watching a young woman proudly discuss wanking on our TV screens may have seemed like an impossibility when we were fifteen, the pair are conscious to approach subjects in a way that will help open up conversations, not shut people off for fear of judgement. “We learn so much from our mum, because we’re like this is our experience now. Especially me talking to her about queer stuff. We weren’t scared, but we were like, how do we conduct this in a way that was going to be ok for her? She’s come into our world – now we live together in London, she’s so inspired by us. We’re these young women who she finds fascinating, because we’re talking about fannies and things. You can tell she’s so inspired because she’s never been around it. She is uplifted by it.”
Their mum isn’t the only one. Watching the two chat back and forth, a small glimmer of hope enters my mind for possibly the first time during lockdown. We finish our conversation a few glasses of wine deep, discussing the need for empathy, community, and our mutual distaste for individualistic feminism. While cancel culture lives on and beauty standards are far from diminished, watching the Wood sisters teach each other makeup tricks and open up with complete honesty reminds me of how many steps that have been made towards making the world a kinder place for women of all ages. As Aimee says, “we’re expressing ourselves, our authentic selves, and that should be a thing to be celebrated.”
Words: Ione Gamble | Photography: Nadia Correia with additional selfies by Aimee and Emily | Collages: Misha MN | Video Editor: Giulia Mucci
