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“It was such a shock for her because things like skin color don’t show up on scans before birth,” Lucy told the Daily Mail in 2015. “So she had no idea that we were so different. When the midwife handed us both to her she was just speechless.”
Throughout the girls’ young lives, their mom would dress them in identical outfits. Nonetheless, it did nothing to conceal the difference in their appearances; the two girls didn’t look like sisters, never mind twins. In fact, while they were growing up, the girls struggled to convince people that they were sisters at all.
“No one ever believes we’re twins,” Lucy explained to the Daily Mail. “Even when we dress alike, we still don’t look like sisters, let alone twins. Friends have even made us produce our birth certificates to prove it.” So how did the girls end up looking so different?
The girls’ mom, Donna Douglas, a 49-year-old warehouse worker, is mixed race with Jamaican heritage. Their dad, Vince Aylmer, a 55-year-old scaffolder, on the other hand, is white. To confuse matters further, the girls have three older siblings with an entirely different skin tone.
Maria and Lucy Aylmer were born on January 16, 1997, in Gloucester, England. They have the same mom and dad and are, in fact, twins. However, their mom was shocked when the twins were handed to her in the delivery room. Her baby girls, after all, couldn’t have looked any less alike.
As non-identical twins, Lucy and Maria were born from separate eggs, so they wouldn’t necessarily inherit the same genes. Moreover, because of their mom’s mixed race ancestry, she possesses genes for both Afro-Caribbean and white skin. The womb, then, would become a skin-color lottery for the twins.
The twins’ older brothers, George, 25, and Jordan, 23, and their older sister Chynna, 24, all have a light-brown skin tone. Maria and Lucy, however, bookend their siblings: Lucy has a very fair complexion; Maria’s skin is a darker tone.
As Lucy explained, “Our brothers and sisters have skin which is in between Maria and I. We are at opposite ends of the spectrum and they are all somewhere in between. But my grandmother has a very fair English rose complexion, just like mine.
The girls’ differences don’t end with their skin color, either. For instance, Lucy has blue eyes, while Maria’s are brown. Lucy is also a red-head and prefers to straighten her natural curls, and Maria’s hair, by contrast, is a mass of thick black curls.
There are dramatic differences in their personalities, too. Indeed, Maria is far more outgoing and confident than her sister. “I love meeting people,” Maria told Inside Edition. “I’m not scared to approach people.” “Whereas I am,” Lucy admitted. “I’m terrified of going up to random strangers.”
To further add to their differences, the girls’ style choices also couldn’t be less similar. Maria, for example, loves getting dressed up and opts for tailored clothing and a sophisticated look. Lucy, at the opposite end of the scale, prefers more casual clothes.
So whereas many twins can prank kids and teachers in school, Lucy and Maria could never fool their classmates. Lucy told the Daily Mail, “We were in the same class, but no one had a problem telling us apart. Twins are known for swapping identities, but there was no way Maria and I could ever do anything like that.”
Their differences, however, did take a toll on the young twins. By the time they turned ten, for instance, they insisted that they no longer wanted to dress alike. Lucy even admitted that she didn’t feel like a twin. “We don’t look alike. So why should we have to wear the exact same thing?” she said to Inside Edition.
Moreover, Maria often envied Lucy’s straight hair. As she admitted to Inside Edition, “I used to cry about it. I [hated] my curly hair.” For Lucy, things hit a low point when she was bullied at school. “They thought I was adopted and called me a ghost,” she recalled tearfully.
So, did their differences cause problems between the girls as they were growing up? Well, while they were never at war, it seems that their individuality inevitably created a distance between the twins. It’s a gap that Lucy feels could have been bridged had they looked more alike.
“I think if we’d looked similar or even identical, then the bond between us would have been stronger when we were younger,” Lucy told Yahoo Style in 2015. “But Maria and I had such different personalities, too. She was the outgoing twin whilst I was the shy one.”
With age, though, the twins have grown much closer. Lucy told Yahoo Style, “Now we have grown older, even though we still look so different, the bond between us is much stronger.” Indeed, the girls would now even describe themselves as “best friends,” despite their differences.
“Most twins look like two peas in a pod – but we couldn’t look more different if we tried,” Lucy explained to the Daily Mail. “We don’t look like we have the same parents, let alone having been born at the same time.” Now, however, these differences are something the twins celebrate.
Lucy now attends Gloucester College as an art student, and Maria is pursuing her interest in law at Cheltenham College. “Now we are proud of the fact that we are each other’s twin sister,” Lucy told Yahoo Style. “Maria loves telling people at college that she has a white twin – and I’m very proud of having a black twin.”
