Four-year-old ‘mirror image’ twins do everything in opposite ways

Four-year-old ‘mirror image’ twins do everything from separating hair to holding a pen in opposite ways.

According to their mother Zoe (42), Leah and Erin Sullivan, from Inverness, Scotland, are like ‘two sides of the same coin’.

While Leah shares her hair on the left, Erin shares hair on the right, and both prefer to throw opposite hands or write.

The pair even sleep in exactly the same position, but on different sides.

They are twins of the mirror image – a little known phenomenon which means that other siblings are asymmetrical in their appearance and how they move or interact.

It is believed that the phenomenon affects up to a quarter of identical twins, and Zoe found out that her twins were affected last year.

Stay-at-home mom Zoe said: ‘When their hair is up, it’s really hard to tell them apart!

‘Leah’s hair grew faster, but only when they were both about two and a half did their edges grow out and I realized it was separating on different sides!

‘It did not matter what you did, like trying to separate them in the middle or on the other side, and that’s actually the only way you can distinguish them!

‘That’s when we realized it was a mirror twin. Erin thinks we can be left-handed, but Leah is definitely right-handed.

“After I noticed it, I looked it up on the internet, it can be really extreme!”

She said Leah usually stands on the left in photos, with Erin on the right, and they walk with opposite dominant feet.

And when they face each other, it looks like they’re looking in the mirror.

Their nursery also uses their unique hairstyles to distinguish the difference, but there may be even more symmetries that reveal themselves as the girls get older.

Zoe added: ‘They differ completely in personality. Almost like different sides of the same coin.

‘Every personality Leah has does not have Erin, and vice versa.

‘Erin is very straight from the line – what you see is what you get – but Lea is more brutal and the opposite!

‘You see a lot of twins who are personal, but with them it’s like one person being split in two.

“Leah has a great sense of humor, but Erin does not understand it – she is much more serious.”

Identical twins are the result of a single fertilized egg that is divided into two embryos between four and eight days after fertilization.

Mirror twins are thought to be the result of the egg splitting even later, between nine and twelve days, although this has never been proven.

Mother-of-eleven Zoe said: ‘A twin does run in my family because my grandfather was a twin and I have twin aunts, but they were still a bit shocked!

“I also had a non-identical twin four years before, and I think part of me knew deep down that they would be twins, but I was more shocked that they would be identical.”

The girls were born on January 25, 2016 at 27 weeks early, on the eighth birthday of her first set of twins.

Leah weighed 3 lb 4 oz and Erin 2 oz 6 oz at birth and was hospitalized for six and ten weeks, respectively.

Leah developed a folded lung, Erin developed sepsis and had extra fluid in her brain, and both girls had heart murmurs.

At one point, Erin weighed only 810 g, and with seven other children at home at the time, both parents were exhausted.

Zoe, who is married to daughter Ben, said: ‘It was a very traumatic time.

“Ben was looking after the other kids for half a day while I was in the hospital, and then we would swap – I have no idea how we did it!”

Zoe admitted that it was almost impossible to distinguish the girls from each other when they were babies.