With 9 words, Aimee Lou Wood silenced the 'harmless joke' about her appearance. 

Unless you've been sequestered in a "no phone" resort in Thailand, you've probably heard by now about Aimee Lou Wood's teeth. The break-out star of The White Lotus has garnered quite a bit of attention for her chompers with literally thousands of social media commenters praising the actress for her unique smile; something Wood has said she's found refreshing after years of being bullied for it.

So it's disappointing to see that Saturday Night Live has produced a skit lampooning them.

Called The White Potus, there's Donald Trump playing the Jason Isaacs father character, sinking into ego death over his mismanagement of the tariff mess.

There's Chloe Fineman doing a bang-on impersonation of Parker Posey's character slash Melania, blissfully unaware of her husband's missteps.

Jon Hamm was hosting so he had the dubious honour of playing Robert F Kennedy Jr, the new head of the US health department who believes fluoride is harmful and wants it out of the water supply, (that's true, by the way).

Which is where Wood's character, Chelsea, comes in. Depicted by Sarah Sherman wearing a set of false teeth, she asks Kennedy Jr, "Fluoride? What's that?"

Get it? Because she has different-looking teeth she must have poor hygiene; they must be damaged.

Well, thankfully, people weren't having it, with loads of commenters calling it "bullying" and "punching down". Even poor Wood herself responded, saying "I did find the SNL thing mean and unfunny" adding, because she is a human woman who feels doubt even when she's standing up for herself, "felt righteous and might delete later".

She later added: "Last thing I'll say on the matter. I am not thin-skinned. I actually love being taken the piss out of when it's clever and in good spirits. But the joke was about fluoride. I have big gap teeth not bad teeth. I don't mind caricature — I understand that's what SNL is. But the rest of the skit was punching up and I/Chelsea was the only one punched down on."

Far be it from me to feel sorry for a successful actress, but that's heartbreaking. Wood has since said that SNL apologised, which is great but this is a woman who was open about her struggles.

She said in an interview she had such terrible body dysmorphia she used to write "fat" on the mirror as a teen. A woman who, when a producer on The White Lotus said they had to fight for her to be cast, immediately spiralled into believing she was ugly. 

Image: @aimeelouwood Instagram.

We're living in a time where shiny veneers are rampant. It's no longer enough to have normal teeth now, you have to have perfect ivory piano keys — uniform, homogenised and unnaturally, blindingly white. 

It's no longer enough to be thin, you have to have the "right" body with a flat tummy and big boobs and the right sort of boobs, too. It's no longer enough to be "wrinkle-free"; you also have to have poreless, glass skin with no freckles or differences in skin colour on your face, which by the way goes all the way down to your perfect boobs, so don't skimp on that terrible neck! It's no longer enough to have hair, your hair probably has "low porosity" and you need to thicken it. Are we noticing a theme yet? That's right — it's never, ever good enough.

Mike White, the lauded creator of the show, is known for casting actors who look like real people. Walton Goggins is balding, Jon Gries is bald. Jennifer Coolidge had a career resurrection, in part, because she has a normal body. This is White's genius and why these characters manage to embed themselves in our consciousness.

Watch: Who is in your White Lotus Season 4 cast? Post continues after video.

We all loved Wood because her character Chelsea refused to be dimmed by her partner, Rick's dark mood. Sure, there was probably a lot of co-dependent dysfunction in their relationship, but seen through a larger lens, what Chelsea practiced was a type of sunny defiance in the face of not just Rick's violent obsession with revenge, but Saxon's toxic masculinity. Chelsea wouldn't bow to old-fashioned patriarchy and her smile — unique and very unHollywood — was emblematic of that. Wood's smile was a breath of fresh air in a culture that says women must be narrowly "beautiful." Is it any wonder we keep seeing the "same face" pop up in movies when we demand this?

"Omg Margot Robbie looks just like Jaime Pressly looks just like Emma Mackey!" Yeah, that's not a freaky coincidence — that's the point.

Feminist writer Naomi Wolf once wrote that "A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience."

Is it a coincidence that just as the body-positive movement starts to gain traction and GLP1 inhibitors make Ozempic accessible, the beauty standards get more and more precise and unattainable? What's next? Are our eyeballs not white enough? Are our uvulas too dangly? 

It's great that SNL has apologised — it was a lazy, unfunny joke. But there's a sad irony here about a woman playing a character who would not be influenced by men, only to be wounded by the most patriarchal thing of all — her looks.

Feature Image: HBO/SNL.