Twin Girls Who Don’t Even Look Like Sisters

Alan Cheung
By Alan Cheung
April 26, 2019Trending
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Twin Girls Who Don’t Even Look Like Sisters
An undated stock photo of a mother holding a baby. (Echo Grid/Unsplash)

Lucy Aylmer has ginger hair, blue eyes, and fair skin. Maria Aylmer has black hair, brown eyes, and darker skin.

Both of them were born at the same time, from the same parents in 1997, New York Post reported.

They are twins, even though they don’t look related; this is due to their mixed-race heritage.

One of our most-shared stories of 2015:

Posted by New York Post on Friday, December 25, 2015

Their father Vince is white and their mother Donna is half-white, half-Jamaican.

Parents typically dress their identical twins in the same clothes. This pair is far from identical, however, and they showed resistance even at a young age.

“When we turned about 7 I think,” Lucy said in an interview on Good Morning Britain. “I said to my mum, ‘I don’t want to wear the same thing as Maria anymore, we look nothing alike,’ we like very different sorts of styles and stuff like that as well.”

“She dresses a lot different than me,” Maria added. “Because we were dressed the same, we was [sic] like, ‘No, we want to be so different.'”

When the interviewer asked whether they have a “psychic connection,” as some twins do, they said no—with some exceptions.

“I wouldn’t say psychic, no,” Maria said. “We’ve had the odd couple of moments of like, we get the same pains. ‘Oh that’s weird I have that pain too,’ or it might be the opposite side of us or something.”

Their personalities are also opposite.

Maria explained that when Lucy was young she was “always the shy one. As Lucy matured, Maria said, she grew out of her shell a little more.

“As we got older, like, she did get more confident,” Maria said. “But she is still quite shy, but I’ve always been the one that just takes charge.”

We see a clear difference in their personalities when we look at their college studies: Lucy, the ginger-haired twin, studied art and design at college, while Maria studied law and psychology, according to The Post.

The unusual pairing also has three other siblings that range in skin tone.

Lucy said that one of the best things about being non-identical is that people don’t mistake them for each other.

“We were in the same class at infant school, but no one ever had a problem telling us apart,” Lucy said. “Most twins look like two peas in a pod—but Maria and I couldn’t look more different if we tried. We don’t even look like we have the same parents, let alone having been born at the same.”

There is a clear difference between twins born from the same sperm and twins born from two separate sperm.

“[Identical twins] occur when a single sperm fertilizes an egg that subsequently splits into two genetically identical, but separate embryos,” IFLScience explains. “Non-identical, or fraternal, twins, on the other hand, are usually the result of the mother releasing two eggs at the same time, both of which become fertilized by two different sperms. Rather than being genetically identical, these share 50% of their DNA like normal siblings do.”

Their mother carried genes for both white and dark skin. This is how Lucy could inherit genes for white skin, and Maria for black skin, according to the scientific publication.

Such dramatic genetics are uncommon but they are possible, IFLS says. “Most of the time, children will inherit a ‘blend’ of their parents’ featuresas was the case with their siblings. In the twins’ case, they each happened to inherit incredibly different features. Additionally, many British individuals with Afro-Caribbean heritage are directly descended from white Europeans, which raises the chance of producing offspring with white skin.”

Epoch Times reporter Jack Phillips contributed to this article

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