A teenage girl accidentally shaved her teeth after a routine visit to the dentist.
Caitlyn Weld, from Tennessee, USA, was just 18 when she went to get a root canal in Florida as a college student.
You wouldn’t know it, but in a video posted on TikTok earlier this month, the content creator says her current teeth “aren’t real.”
The teenager thought she was getting a standard root canal. (Getty Photo)
A fresh-faced student at Florida State, the then-teenager had the daunting task of finding a new dentist in a new state, which should have been simple enough.
However, there is a lot of pressure to get your first root canal, even if the financial burden is taken off your shoulders by family.
Now 22, Caitlyn admits she was scared, explaining in a TikTok caption: “I was scared so I asked the lady as we were in the room, ‘What does a root canal feel like? It will hurt, can you? explain the procedure to me?” But he didn’t speak English very well, so I never found out.”
The first red flag appeared, but still, Caitlyn continued with the process.
Things kicked off, but Caitlyn revealed: “I didn’t have a mirror on the whole thing so I couldn’t see what was going on.”
However, she immediately realized what had happened when a mirror was raised to her face.
Caitlin had accidentally filed her teeth and looked in the mirror to see this. (@caitlynweld/TikTok)
The dentist asked her what shade she wanted for her veneers, revealing that her tiny stems were the remains of her real teeth.
Of course, this was too much for Caitlyn to process, so she asked her friend to pick out the shade while she tried to come to terms with what had just happened.
The short, viral video of Caitlyn reacting to her hard teeth now has over 22 million views at the time of writing.
He began to explain: “I was told that the severity of the hole in one of my teeth, the one I had the root canal done, was so bad that they took precautions to prevent it from happening to any of my teeth.
“[They said] girls my age normally want all their teeth to look the same color and they didn’t want one color to be brighter than the rest and they also told me about the safety of my teeth.
“I was like ‘okay’, I was dumb, I was 18, I had no idea about teeth anything, so I went ahead with it. They made it sound necessary, we didn’t know any different.”
The big difference though is the steep price increase.
In the US, a root canal costs about $1,000 (£775) per tooth, while a veneer costs about four times that, meaning a full front set would cost about $40,000 (£31,000).
Although the cost is eye-watering, there is a bigger issue surrounding the procedure, with the NHS website describing a root canal as ‘painless’, while the process of getting veneers is known to be excruciating.
Caitlyn shared her experiences of everyday life with veneers: “I remember when they took the temporaries out and the wind blowing what the hell was left was probably the worst pain I’ve ever seen.”
Her temporary veneers were more of a nuisance than anything else. (@caitlynweld/TikTok)
Nor did he sue the dentist, as the dentist’s reasoning at the time was convincing enough to let it go.
Caitlyn now looks back on it as a funny story to share and continues to keep the dentist’s identity private.
“These are my teeth now, they really don’t look much different from the previous teeth,” she said.
“I feel like they’re a bit longer, I also bite my gums really bad when I chew, which I never really did.”
