Are We Finally Ready To Start Celebrating ‘Real’ Teeth?

Photo by Ksenia Chernaya / Pexels

We’ve all seen the memes, we’ve all heard the horror stories.

Turkey teeth. Dental tourism. Spending 50 quid on a Ryanair flight with the intention of returning with a whole new mouth.

What was once reserved only for Love Island contestants has become mainstream, as everyone and their mam heads oversees to return with teeth so uniform (and so bright) you’d be forgiven for thinking they were placed by accident.

For a while, veneers were all the rage. Those of us with crooked teeth envied the simple perfection of a fresh set. We lamented our own untouched mouths. We wanted to be like the rich and famous, who could afford to have their smiles completely redone and boast the perfect pearly whites.

They were the goal, and if you couldn’t have them, you’d at least spend your evenings with whitening strips, brightening gels, and special powders, repeatedly Googling ‘Invisalign cost’ hoping the price had somehow gone down.

Bright, white, and straight was a sign of luxury – but is the desire for ‘perfect’ fake-like teeth for waning, and are we finally starting to embrace our natural smiles?

 

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“Teeth are generally the first thing we see in each other as a physical attribute which is why they are held in such high regard,” says MiDentalCare Director Niamh Webb O’Rourke. 

“They’re also one of the biggest contributors to our overall confidence,” so it makes sense that we’ve had a bit of an obsession with them, well, forever.

But there’s a difference between ‘good’ teeth and ‘fake’ teeth. The two aren’t mutually exclusively – something that we’re only seeing more and more of in Hollywood and beyond.

These days, every time there’s a major red carpet event, you’ll see users across social media celebrating celebrities with ‘natural’ teeth, and calling for more ‘unique’ smiles, with crooked teeth galore.

There’s calls for the return of the 90s and early 2000s teeth in pop culture, when gums weren’t uniform and gaps were prevalent – when you could tell an actor from just their smile, distinctive and regular.

sorry if this is rude to say but i miss when famous people had normal human teeth. i can watch whole films without seeing a single naturally occurring set of chompers and it’s unnerving

— Beth McColl (@imbethmccoll) December 8, 2023

“I think people embracing their ‘normal’ teeth now is amazing to see,” says Niamh. “Our teeth and smile are unique to each and every single one of us so the fact we are losing the stigma of having to have perfect teeth is great.

“We went through a good few years of patients wanting this perfect smile with fake looking teeth and we are definitely seeing an increase of patients just wanting to enhance their natural smile now rather than completely changing it!” 

Niamh adds that in her opinion, a person shouldn’t be getting major dental work like venees purely for cosmetic reasons… or because they’re on trend.

Where some patients need to get veneers for health reasons, “you should not be getting veneers solely for aesthetic reasons due to the continuous up keep of them. If you have healthy crooked teeth, embrace the perfectly imperfect smile – it is beautiful!”

• Teeth