“There’s no way to say this without sounding sick, but I love seeing real human teeth.” Guardian journalist Madeleine Aggeler published last month on X, citing a photo of Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons on the Oscars red carpet. In the image, the pair are smiling widely and although their teeth are white, they are also undeniably real: Dunst’s upper lip curls to reveal a hint of gum above gently crooked teeth, Plemons’s to reveal marginally uneven incisors.
So far, the post has received just over 70k likes, revealing that Agler is far from alone in her sentiment. “The veneer crop is out of control,” one user replied. “They gentrified his mouth,” quipped another in response to a before and after photo of the Liverpool manager. Jurgen Kloppwhose teeth, once coarse and stained with age, have now been replaced with a set of gleaming white chiclet veneers.
So how did we get to a place where real celebrity teeth are so rare that they’re causing an internet firestorm of delight? Dental intervention has been around since the pyramids (even Cleopatra reportedly wore one splint-like structure) and has been recorded in most documented cultures. However, the de facto ideal smile that has prevailed in Western society, particularly in the US, is one of straight, white teeth. There are ideological reasons for this: the colonial British and their ancestors have long associated the color white purity, peaceand condition. There are also practical ones: stained teeth can be symptoms of aging and various health conditions, while crooked teeth can be more difficult to clean and use.
The American dream
In the mid-20th century, the exploding field of American dentistry put these environmental concerns on steroids. Then Hollywood upped the ante. Dental intervention, even when necessary out of necessity, was expensive, so good teeth became a marker of class and social status, an integral part of the American dream. A poker-straight smile became a middle-class birthright as parents sent their teenage girls to the orthodontist for braces.
Those who don’t have the disposable income to polish and straighten idiosyncratic smiles — and those who don’tthe insurance that covers cleanings and fillings to keep their teeth healthy—became collateral damage. (In 2023, 68.5 million adults in the US they got by without dental insurance.) Bad teeth were associated with an unwillingness or inability to take care of oneself. It’s a trope that has real-world consequences: “Poor teeth, I knew, don’t just breed shame but more poverty: people with bad teeth have trouble finding jobs and other opportunities. People without jobs are poor. Poor people can’t access dentistry — and so the cycle goes,” noted author Sarah Smarsh in her seminal essay “Poor teeth‘, a visceral account of the ‘psychological hell of having poor teeth in a rich, capitalist country’.
However, while working-class Americans were losing teeth to treatable diseases, cosmetic dentistry was growing into a multi-billion dollar industry. Doctors supplemented braces and bleach with veneers, in which the dentist bonds a layer of porcelain or composite material to a filed tooth. Veneers were quickly adopted by the Hollywood set who wanted to emulate their hometown smile (since 1929, temporary porcelain dentures had been used to perfect the teeth of actors on screen), and even Dunst herself reported that he had been pressured by a Spider-man producer to “fix” her teeth. (Of course, in many cases false teeth can be medically necessary and life-changing, but the majority of people who seek them are driven by aesthetics rather than function.)
However, once social media appeared, veneers became ubiquitous, a mandatory component of “Instagram Face,The unusual, herbalized beauty ideal propagated by influencers and achieved through cosmetic enhancements. “In Western cultures, women are increasingly expected to look a certain way: the condition is women who have so much plastic surgery that they end up looking like a certain caricature, and straight white teeth are part of that,” says Dr. Carlos Quiñonez, associate dean and director at the Schulich School of Dentistry, Western University in London, Ontario.
Cosmetic dentists themselves soon became neighborhood influencers, amassing colossal social media followings that they used to lure new patients. “Taking a medical procedure and refashioning it as a marketable consumer good is not a simple process, but it’s one for which the structure and culture of Instagram work almost perfectly,” Amanda Mull wrote in The Atlantic.
Back bite
But as the response to Dunst’s post suggests, there is a growing wave of resistance against unusually perfect teeth. This pushback is particularly evident on TikTok, where videos criticizing the veneers have garnered hundreds of thousands of likes. Users praise actors like Jacob Elordi for keeping (no pun intended) his “imperfect” teeth and lament celebrities’ pre-intervention smiles. In a very successful video, the creator @corabrei he goes so far as to compare the popularity of veneers to the prevalence of breast implants in previous decades. “I am convinced that veneers are the new breast implant. Everyone has them like they had those big double Ds in the 90s and 2000s. But the big difference between veneers and implants is that you can’t reverse your veneers,” she warns.
Of course, the embrace of imperfect teeth is not exclusive to the West. In parts of Southeast Asia, teeth were historically blackened as a means of attracting a sexual partner, while women of the Mentawai tribe in Indonesia have long sharpened their teeth for cosmetic reasons. In Japan, yaebateeth with a crooked, fang-like appearance (“snaggletooth” in American parlance), have seen an explosion in popularity over the past 15 years, inspired by their presence in anime and pop stars such as Tomomi Itano. This led to a wave of young women paying to cover their upper fangs with vampiric decorative teeth.
“I just thought my teeth were out of alignment and it was kind of a blessing in disguise because it gave me more character and made me more memorable,” says dental student and educator TikToker Michaella Lichauco, who went viral. video about yaeba which set off an avalanche of excitement. “It’s been so heartwarming to see so many comments from viewers who found my content relatable…as well as those who, until watching my video, hadn’t recognized the charm and beauty in imperfection,” she says.
Much of the criticism of veneers is based on the idea that they rob us of our character. (This is especially true of the actors in period pieces wearing unnaturally pearly whites.) Quiñonez sees these celebrations of imperfection as part of a collective weariness with the same education from social media. “When I open Instagram, it’s really a lot of homogenous people in terms of what they look like, what they’re promoting and so on,” she says. “So it could [embracing natural teeth] is it a rejection of this cultural push towards homogeneity that social media brings about, for better or for worse?’ This attitude is reflected in digital trends like #mecore, which sees Gen Z cultivating a sense of style regardless of what’s trending, as well as a recent wave of resistance against anti-aging procedures and fillers. It also echoes the nonconformity inherent in long-standing movements like body positivity and the embrace of gray hair.
The backlash against artificially perfect teeth could also signal a rejection of what they have come to represent in modern America. “Straight white teeth, orthodontics, seeing the dentist every six months became part of the suburban ritual. You had your 2.3 kids, your one car in your driveway, and your perfectly green lawn—it was perfect. “I think this rejection deeply reflects a general rejection of what I would call ‘cultural capitalism,'” says Quiñonez.
Veneers for the masses
Today, however, the class associations around false teeth are changing. In US and UK dental clinics, veneers are expensive and cost between $925 and $2,500 per tooth. So to bridge the gap (pun intended), in the early 2010s, dentists in countries like Hungary, Turkey, Bulgaria and Thailand began offering affordable Hollywood smile pastels. Many of these dentists, however, fit their patients with crowns instead of veneers, a quicker, easier procedure, but one that wins away in the tooth much more. Just as they frequent sunbeds to mimic the look of having just returned from an expensive vacation, regular people are damaging their bodies in pursuit of a beauty standard propagated by the rich and famous. “Society often finds itself susceptible to the influence of internet trends and celebrity endorsements… As a result, oral health often becomes a secondary concern, with trends or aesthetics overshadowing function,” he says.Lichauco.
Smiles obtained through dental tourism are also often pre-white and incongruous with the faces that frame them. Therefore, rather than flattening dental privilege, “turkey teeth” have come to cause a similar kind of class crisis to bad teeth. “People want straight, white teeth because they want to fit in… It’s like a thirst for dignity when you’re socially and economically excluded,” says Quiñonez. The turkey-teeth banter is “cheap resistance,” he says: “There’s nothing complicated about having someone else so thirsty for dignity that they’re willing to act like clowns, even if they don’t think so.”
As it stands, the global veneer market is is displayed to grow from $1534 million (in 2023) to $2280.5 million by 2030. It’s hard to say whether newfound social media resistance—whether cheap or loaded with anti-capitalist sentiment—will gain enough momentum to change that . Regardless, the rise of challenges to algorithmic osmosis signals a welcome turning of the tide. “People are just hungry for something real,” says Quiñonez.
