The Real American Dream is Straight, White Teeth

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English model Kitty Hayes on the cover of CR Fashion Book. (Photo: CR Fashion Book/Anthony Maule)

Growing up in suburban America with an oral surgeon as a mother, it was given that I had to get braces as a teenager, especially as my gigantic adult teeth mashed against each other in jagged — and painful — angles. Like the rest of my classmates who were also undergoing awkward stages of puberty, I looked forward to getting the metal orthodontic fixtures into my mouth, but not because I wanted alternating pink-and-black bands to match my t-shirt from Hot Topic. Ever since my baby teeth had fallen out and my adult teeth had decided to grow like an overcrowded cemetery, I had transformed from a bubbly child into a close-lipped teenager, all because I didn’t want to show anyone my jagged fangs.

After 18 months of avoiding popcorn and bubble gum, my braces were off! My teeth were straight. All I had to do was promise to wear my Invisalign retainers at night for the rest of my life, and that felt like an easy promise to keep in return for a socially-approved smile.

The American obsession with straight, white teeth is well documented — just ask singer-songwriter Jewel. In June 2013, she wrote an essay in Redbook about spending her career being told to “fix” her teeth. “I — despite having written 500 songs, having hits in nearly every genre, getting Grammy nominations, singing for a pope and a president — am best known for having crooked teeth,” she wrote. Dentists offered to straighten her teeth for free. DJs introduced her to their shows as “snaggle-toothed,” never mind her Grammy nominations and platinum albums. “In ad campaigns, my teeth have been Photoshopped to perfection without my knowledge,” Jewel added. “I suppose because my snaggle would distract from the product I was promoting?”

This preoccupation with the “perfect” smile isn’t universal, contrary to what orthodontists and teeth whitening brands tell you. “I don’t need to straighten my teeth,” a European friend told me while we were students together in England. “It’s so American to give a s—.” She, like Jewel, could be referred to as “snaggle-toothed,” and while she was a student at an Ivy League in the States, her American classmates did, indeed enquire as to how the daughter of a German politician, who could easily afford the procedure, never bothered to get braces. My British friends commiserated — it’s a running American joke that our friends across the pond have “bad” teeth, but there’s some truth to the difference in the British attitude towards dentistry: according to market research group Mintel, only 3 percent of people in the UK have gotten teeth whitening treatments, compared to 14 percent in the US. In America, cosmetic dentistry is the largest nonsurgical beauty market after cosmetics themselves. In June 2015, New York’s Science of Us blog reported that the number of teenagers in North America with orthodontic treatment has doubled in the past two decades. And back in February 2015, CR Fashion Book made a splash in the media for casting and photographing cover model 17-year-old English model Kitty Hayes — with her braces on.

“In the past few decades, Americans have been conditioned to want that ‘Hollywood’ smile — flawless, super white, perfectly straight teeth,” Manhattan-based dentist Sivan Finkel, DMD, told Yahoo Beauty. “It became a kind of status symbol, whereas in Japan for instance, people don’t want their teeth as white, perfect because it brings shame when others know they had work done.” In his six years of professional practice so far, the cosmetic dentist — who double majored in art as an undergraduate — has noticed that Americans are slowly veering away from the bleached, Barbie-doll smile. “A more natural — but healthy! — ideal has also dominated in Europe and South America, and fortunately, Americans are shifting towards this now, too,” he noted. “Consider the prevalence of top models with gaps in their teeth these days.”

But this isn’t just about a choice of aesthetics. It’s a class issue in the United States, too. In her essay, “The Shame of Poor Teeth in a Rich World” for Aeon, journalist Sarah Marsh, describing her childhood in poverty in Kansas, notes that more than half of the United States is without dental coverage. (In Europe, free dental care is provided by the government.) “[T]he underprivileged are priced out of the dental-treatment system yet perversely held responsible for their dental condition,” she wrote. The character Tiffany ‘Pennsatucky’ Doggett in Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, is well known for her “gnarly” teeth — so much so that “Pennsatucky teeth” is a pejorative used on social media. Marsh describes her young grandmother in Wichita, who had all her adult teeth pried out in her 20s. They were “too far gone or too expensive to save.” The logic is painfully easily to understand: if more than half of Americans cannot get their once-a-year dental checkups covered by insurance, it is unlikely that they will get teeth whitening or cosmetic orthodontia either. The prejudicial consequences are painful, too: According to studies from 2012, 38 percent of Americans wouldn’t go on a second date with someone with non-straight teeth, and individuals with straight teeth are 38 percent more likely to be considered smarter.

My own mother spent more than 20 years fixing other people’s teeth in China and the United States before one of her friends, a orthodontist, offered to get her braces. After two years of wearing semi-invisible ceramic braces, my mother had straight teeth, just like the ones that she preached to her patients at the clinic. Perhaps this is the real American dream: the ability to afford straight, white teeth.

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