Is the trend for flawless teeth over?
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Fashions shift and now ‘too perfect’ white teeth risk wiping the smile off your face. Last summer, I fell and cracked four of my front teeth. Pieces chipped off at unhelpful times, I spat small shards politely into the sink and cursed every uneven paving stone and every apple, too. The dentist told me we wouldn’t know whether root canals or similar would be necessary for about six months and, as that six months rolls around, I find myself snarling into the mirror and thinking about teeth far more than is right.
![[Eva Wiseman]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/06/Eva-Wiseman,-L.png?width=180&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Teeth are, I’d always thought, like deep sea creatures or details of my screen time, really none of my business. Their job is to gnaw, gnash, slice and grind as effectively and quietly as possible. My job is to keep them clean. That’s it. Fin. Beyond the brushing, none of my business. Cracking the front ones, however, has also opened a crack in my relationship with teeth, and now I am suddenly aware, not just of their precarious vulnerability, but of their increasingly weird place in contemporary culture.
When I interviewed Rylan in 2022, he had just had his veneers smashed out and replaced with something “more natural”, and where Rylan goes, the world tends to follow. The dental prosthetics market has tripled over the past 20 years and is expected to grow by more than 70% in the next five, driven (according to a piece in the Cut about the rise of “beautifully imperfect veneers”) by young people “asking for veneers that look increasingly like subtly better versions of the teeth they already have”. But like the ‘no makeup’ makeup and the trend towards skincare over foundation, “imperfect” veneers aren’t simply the return to nature they claim to be, they’re a marker of class, an expensive evolution of artificiality.
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