'Outdaughtered': How Can You Tell Ava And Olivia Busby Apart?
It's tricky but there's ways.
TLC All five of the Busby quints on Outdaughtered definitely looks related. But two of the five girls look like peas in a pod. Ava and Olivia are identical twins, as well as being two of the five quintuplets.
Fans might struggle a little bit trying to keep track of which girl is which when they watch the show. The blonde hair, blue eyes, and dimples are near carbon copies so it takes a minute to figure which twin is on screen at any moment. We have found with a little practice, it's possible to tell the twins apart at a glance.
How can you tell Ava and Olivia Busby apart?
Check out our helpful hints:
Their hair is a bit different.
The easiest way to tell which twin you are looking at is to check out their hair. They're both blonde but the texture of their long hair is slightly different. Ava has long, silky hair that curls just a bit at the ends. Olivia, on the other hand, boasts fantastic curls all the way down the length of her locks. In fact, Olivia has the curliest hair of all six of the girls in the family, including older sister Blayke.
Check their accessories.
You can also tell which twin is which by their earrings. When the girls were little babies their family color-coded their clothing to make them easier to tell apart: Ava wore pink, Parker wore yellow, Riley wore purple, Hazel wore green, and Olivia wore dark pink. Now that they're older, they don't dress in their "quint colors" anymore — in fact, they can often be spotted in five identical outfits. But the girls all have pierced ears and their earrings reflect the colors they were assigned as babies.
Ava is the sassy one.
The girls have different personalities, of course, and TV fans as well as their parents can spot the differences in how they act. Ava comes with a lot of spunk and isn't afraid to speak her mind. But she'll do it all from a comfortable position since she's known as the lazy quint. "This girl is the sassiest of all the girls and she also is still holding the title for the laziest," her mom says about her. "She is full of emotions and exaggerations ... but how we love ALL that about her. She is sensitive, loves to cuddle, is so goofy and makes silly faces all the time and most of all, she LOVES to dance!"
Ava goofs around.
Olivia is the family comedienne.
Olivia is often playing it for laughs and loves to get her family giggling, according to her mom. "Olivia never stops making others laugh. She is goofy like Ava but in a different way. She wants everyone around her to notice her, but in a way where she make sure others know how fun and funny she is," Danielle says. "She is the “adapter”… meaning she just goes with the flow and plays whatever anyone else is doing. However, she is super-opinionated, lol. She has the best jolly laugh with the cutest two dimples."
Olivia flashes dimples.
Why are they the only identical pair?
In order to conceive, the Busby adults had to do fertility treatments. For their older daughter, Blayke, they used a combination of fertility drugs to enhance ovulation and intrauterine insemination to increase the likelihood of sperm meeting egg. In that case, they ended up with just one baby. The second time they tried to get pregnant, the unexpected happened and they conceived multiples. Danielle released multiple eggs in a single cycle, probably due to the medication she was using, and four eggs were fertilized at once. Then one of those fertilized eggs split into two embryos who would be identical twins. Those twins ended up being Ava and Olivia. The other three eggs grew into Parker, Riley, and Hazel.
They really are identical.
What's next for the Busby quints?
This season, the family is contending with the COVID-19 quarantine just like the rest of the country. Trying to manage six kids during a global pandemic has all kinds of challenges including how to homeschool all the girls.
Outdaughtered airs on TLC on Tuesdays.
Rebekah Kuschmider has been writing about celebrities, pop culture, entertainment, and politics since 2010. She is the creator of the blog FeminXer and she is a cohost of the weekly podcast The More Perfect Union.