‘Turkey teeth’: Have veneers lost their luster?

The quest for perfect teeth goes back thousands of years: the Romans used urine for a bright effect (which, while gross, isn’t as crazy as it sounds since urine contains ammonia, a bleaching agent). Although there is no longer a need for brushing to achieve a winning smile, we are still obsessed with perfecting our teeth – the size of the global cosmetic dentistry market was assessed at $25 billion in 2023 and is projected to swell to around $54 billion by 2033 – but there are signs that we have reached the peak of pearly white.

Today, if you have the means, one of the ways you can buy your way to perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth is to get veneer. First created by California dentist Charles Pincus in 1928, veneers were made to temporarily change the appearance of actors’ teeth during movie shoots, but in the decades since then veneers have become increasingly affordable – especially with the rise of dentists in countries like Turkey offering procedures (which often involve aggressively filing the patient’s teeth down to small stubs) at extremely competitive prices.

While the cost of veneers can vary from clinic to clinic, on average a full set of veneers costs around £2,000 in Turkey, compared to up to £20,000 in the UK. Today, 150,000 to 200,000 UK residents visit Turkey for cosmetic dental procedures each year and according to research published in 2023, one in ten young people have veneers installed. The situation today is in stark contrast to the past, when veneers were aspirational and largely worn only by Hollywood stars, and as a result, tastes are changing. After all, status symbols can only truly convey status if they are exclusive and inaccessible. Traveling to Turkey for cosmetic dentistry has now become so popular that the trend has spawned a new (and slightly derogatory) neologism – “turkey teeth” – and straight, snow-white teeth are no longer in vogue, as wealthy connoisseurs seek to distance themselves from the ‘mass’.

Of course, it’s worth acknowledging that at £2,000 a pop, turkey teeth are still prohibitively expensive for many. But while the elite and the precariat remained depressingly entrenched at either end of the British class system, over the past century the middle class has grown in size. In this context, the upper middle classes have become increasingly anxious to differentiate themselves from the so-called nouveau riche. “We love nothing more than making fun of other people’s tastes – and the working classes are easy targets,” he explains. Professor Meredith Jonescultural theorist at Brunel University, London. “The more we make fun of someone for their ‘cheap’ or ‘tacky’ stuff, the better we can feel about our middle or upper class choices.”

Reality stars – often they come from the ranks of the lower-middle classes themselves – are often criticized for their “new-coded” appearances online. Many viewers of this season Married At First Sight UK went to X to mock the show’s participants:There’s a reason I stick with MAFS Australia… it’s just full of filler chav, turkey teeth and bowl haircuts“, a user he wrotewith some standing out contestant Adam Nightingale’s veneer as an easy target for mockery.

Earlier this year, Island of Love Contestant Tiffany Leighton trolled relentlessly online for her veneers: Leighton later said The Sun that after she left the villa and saw the vitriol directed at her teeth, she tried to reverse the work she had done. Another ex Island of Love Contestant Sam Gowland was also mocked after revealing his new veneers in August, with people on social media likening his teeth to ‘piano keys’. Gowland fired back with a suspension a TikTok video expressing his bewilderment at the barrage of criticism he had received: “How can you say they don’t look good? They are so white […] I have the physical appearance.”

“Working-class bodies are almost always marked as excessive, as excessive, and turkey teeth are a classic example,” explains Helen Atlanta, author of Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Hurts Women. But he adds that working-class people themselves may not perceive Turkey’s teeth in the same way. “In working-class culture, often the whiter and more artificial the better, because it’s the overt work of beauty that shows you’re a body of value and that you should be included in society.”

While it’s arguable whether Gowland’s teeth look “natural,” he’s right to note that the dominant values ​​of beauty standards look natural over anything overly obvious or blatant. As Atlanta points out, it’s common for influential women to “engage in beauty work to achieve a level of fame before reversing their beauty work once they’ve reached an undeniable level of success and want to be taken ‘more seriously,'” citing the Molly. -Mae Hague is going back to her natural teeth and had her filler removed in 2021 as a prime example of this. “Society still prizes ‘natural’ beauty as a virtue, with middle- and upper-class people still undertaking beauty tasks, but increasingly undetectable ways,” Atlanta continues, with taste-dictating elites now undergoing cutting-edge procedures that produce highly distinctive results. Case in point: it has long been suspected Kate Middleton’s coveted The smile is the result of a little-known process called “micro-rotation,” where braces placed behind the teeth subtly change their alignment to create “harmonic asymmetry.”

There is apparently a very, very fine line between what tasters consider “good” or “bad” teeth. While perfectly even teeth are now derided, at the same time, many of us will remember people taking X to mock the poor teeth of the working class agitators in the wake of this summer’s wave of far-right violence, which reproduces harsh, outdated stereotypes about working-class people with poor oral hygiene. “We can see conversations online praising celebrities like Sabrina Carpenter for the shape of her natural teeth [but] “The same praise doesn’t apply to ‘natural’ teeth that aren’t magically sparkling white or relatively straight,” says Atlanta. “As usual, we are afforded a degree of freedom within a set of narrow constraints. We’re still hanging on to the same tightrope – if our beauty work is too obvious, our efforts too obvious, we face ostracism once again.”

This obsession with “the right kind of teeth” is arguably one of the most powerful examples of how ridiculous beauty standards can be: they’re still meant to be white and straight, but not too white and straight. It’s a cliché, but it’s worth repeating that the effort to keep up with these standards, when fashions can change at a moment’s notice, is very small. Remember that your teeth aren’t unnecessary accessories either – they’re a vital, functioning part of your digestive system. Don’t worry if they don’t look ‘perfectly imperfect’: if you brush twice a day, use mouthwash and floss if necessary, you can’t go too far wrong.