There is no clearer proof of the difference between America and Britain than their attitudes towards teeth. In America you make them. It doesn’t matter if it’s almost straight. You subject yourself to years of semi-torture to achieve the American dream – a white picket fence with perfectly even teeth.
Most perfect teeth are artificial – some so artificial that they have completely replaced real ones
When I was about 11, I was taken to the orthodontist to straighten my slightly overlapping front teeth. I dreaded these dates. Our orthodontist was a tall, overly friendly man with big hairy fingers that he pushed into my tiny mouth without gloves. Certainly this broke protocol even then. “They’re clean,” he said, as the mossy hairs on his fingers from the tree trunk tickled my lips and caught between my teeth.
But hey, I got to choose the color of the torture bands that forced my baby teeth to form. My whole mouth hurt for days after every clench. But that was just normal. Every kid I knew had a brace phase, some bigger than others and some more humiliating. One of my friends had to sleep with a headrest that looked like a wire dog muzzle. She’d come out of it this morning looking like she’d been in a dogfight, hair wild and tangled, slack-jawed and dripping with saliva.
I didn’t have a nighttime head brace. Instead, I had a metal hinge glued to my upper and lower back teeth – a Herbst. This really looked like a torture device. The hinge where the two rods met was so big it put holes in the sides of my cheeks. It doesn’t matter. The flesh of the cheeks grows back. This machine was intended to correct my overbite by fixing my lower jaw so that it grows outwards instead of backwards. Maybe it was worth it. Maybe if I saw a photo of my grown-up self without the Herbst treatment, I’d be glad I had it.
Every American family I know agrees that putting their children through years of orthodontic agony is better than ending up with “British teeth”. In a scene inside The SimpsonsChief Wiggum’s son Ralph visits the dentist’s office where he shows him what happens to little boys who don’t take care of their teeth. “Let’s look at a picture book, Ralph,” says the dentist: he opens it The Big Book of British Smiles. Ralph screams. The unforgiving images of British teeth sticking out – for Americans, there’s hardly anything worse.
But crooked doesn’t mean unhealthy, and that’s what Americans are doing wrong. According to a global oral health survey, 40 per cent of people in the UK reported having no oral health problems – the highest among the countries surveyed. The report also reveals that people in the UK go to the dentist for regular check-ups more often than Americans. My husband is an extreme case: (‘If you don’t go to the dentist, they can’t find anything wrong’), but he has a point. It had been almost ten years since he had been to the dentist, and when he finally did, his teeth were perfect. No cavities. This drew ire and disbelief from the American relatives, whose twice-yearly trips often reveal plaque build-up and several molars on their way to cavities. What’s the secret? Does my husband floss twice a day? Do you use mouthwash stronger than nuclear waste? No, he says; “I’m just brushing.”
He would be the first to admit that his teeth aren’t perfect. There’s a crack in one of the front ones, a relic from when he tried to push open a door that said “Pull”. But who cares? His teeth suit him. He views the perfectly straight, ultra-white teeth with suspicion: “It feels like they’re hiding something,” he says. He is right that most perfect teeth are artificial – some so artificial that they have completely replaced real ones.
More and more people are going abroad for cheap surgery, shaving off their real teeth and getting ‘Turkish teeth’ in their place. TikTok videos show young people filing their real teeth with nail files to make room for fake ones. Do these people realize that their adult teeth will never come back? And if you go under the knife (or nail file) to perfect one body part, won’t every other spot need to be updated to match? It’s like a home DIY project – paint and redecorate one room and the others look poor by comparison. Leave them alone and take on character, remaining distinctly, uniquely yours. My kids are school age now, and we will be approaching braces age soon. I don’t know how it works in Britain, whether my kids will be encouraged to have braces if their teeth show they’re misaligned, and I don’t know if I will either. Their faces are so beautiful the way they are. My four-year-old son already has a chipped front tooth from face-planting while running down an airplane runway, but to me, that makes his smile even more adorable.
Even after all these years with braces, my upper teeth are starting to overlap again. I hadn’t noticed this until my dentist pointed it out. “Do you want to fix it?” I agreed to have an overnight aligner, so we did the dental mold and when the aligner arrived my dentist tried to fit it on my upper teeth. It wasn’t cut to the right size, so when he pushed it in, the sharp plastic edges cut my gums. I took the alignment home anyway. That was three years ago and it still sits, untouched, on my nightstand.
