Last summer, I fell and cracked four of my front teeth. Bits cut off at useless moments, I politely spat little shards into the sink and cursed every uneven cobblestone and every apple too. My dentist said we wouldn’t know if we’d need root canals or anything like that for about six months, and as the six months go by, I find myself snarling in the mirror and thinking about teeth far more than is appropriate.
I’ve always thought teeth are like deep sea creatures or details of my screen time, it’s not really about me. Their job is to gnaw, grind, slice and grind as efficiently and quietly as possible. My job is to keep them clean. That’s all. Flap. Other than brushing, it’s none of my business. Breaking the front ones, however, also opened a rift in my relationship with teeth, and now I’m suddenly aware, not only of their precarious vulnerability, but their increasingly strange place in modern culture.
When I interviewed Rylan in 2022his veneers had just been chipped away and replaced with something “more natural”, and where Rylan goes, people tend to follow. The dental prosthetics market has tripled in the past 20 years and is expected to grow by more than 70% over the next five, driven (according to a piece in Section about the rise of “beautiful imperfect faces”) from young people “demanding faces that look more and more like subtly better versions of the teeth they already have”. But like “no makeup” makeup and the trend toward skincare over foundation, “imperfect” veneers aren’t just the return to nature they claim to be, they’re a class marker, an expensive evolution of artificiality.
This boom in dentures is happening during a severe crisis in NHS dentistry, where (due to dentists leaving and 9 out of 10 practices not accepting new NHS patients) millions of people in the UK are in ‘dental deserts’ without access to basic health care. This has led to horrifying reports of “DIY dentistry”, with people attempting root canals at home and pulling teeth with pliers. And as NHS practices decline, private clinics have begun to develop in strange directions, often repositioning themselves as luxury wellness destinations.
I was invited last year for a press appointment to have my teeth cleaned (an ‘oral detox’) at the Nejati Clinic in Belgravia, a place that had the air of a luxury spa – dim lighting, art books, LED whitening. standard. They say they take “a holistic approach to dental and oral care” and the architecture is “inspired by bone structure”. It was very beautiful and quite strange, and completely unlike any dental office I had visited before – it felt like I was walking through the NHS dentist’s mirror into the world of opposites.
The visit prepared me for a recent one Times article titled, “Why dentists are the new stars of social media,” which introduced “a new breed of super dentists who have entered the beauty arena.” When the typical dental experience is full of frustration and pain, it’s very tempting to follow them.
I’ve never had perfect teeth, not even close, but browsing these dentists’ websites (on a journey that started with searches for possible root canal fees and ended with the idle question of whether I could benefit from a position The “dental microlayer” while they were there…) had begun, I realized, to affect my perception of myself.
In the same way that your bare face, with its pores and blemishes, can start to look odd after being exposed to faces that have been tweaked with fillers and Botox, your unfixed teeth can start to feel odd. Have I really been walking around all this time without gum contours, porcelain veneers and/or internal whitening, like an animal? Like an ANIMAL?
Ideas of perfection are changing – “too perfect” is suddenly revealed as common, as cheap. Its flawlessness reveals the money and effort that went into it, while being “beautifully imperfect,” despite costing three times the price and requiring twice as much work to create, reads not just as acceptable but as morally superior. But that will change again and again and again. My NHS dentist (a nice man, his waiting room has one of those wire tables with colored ball toys that babies can jubilantly push and a TV that silently blasts bad news) says that very soon I may need an operation or crowns. or new teeth, and it’s going to be very painful and very expensive, so I think – I’m very serious – why not knock out a Chelsea spa and get a whole new smile as a lot of work? The crack has opened and I feel myself slowly beginning to fall.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk
