Friday, June 04, 2004

A Lament for Imperfect Teeth

I have fairly average teeth – for a mid-life sort of person who has enjoyed her share of black coffee, red wine, green tea, and blueberry pie. That is to say, in contrast to new standards of artificially whitened choppers, my teeth look like a row of unpopped popcorn kernels. As I face blinding Stepford Smiles everywhere around me, I wonder, how have our standards for tolerable teeth changed so quickly?

Cap-toothed smiles used to be a sure sign of a phony – trade tools for Hollywood actors, sleazy politicians and used-car salesmen. Sometimes this image still holds true, as in the new-to-DVD film by the Cohen brothers, Intolerable Cruelty, in which we are introduced to the slick ways of the handsome divorce lawyer, Miles Massey, in the dentist’s office, with a grotesque close-up shot of his mouth, lips peeled back and teeth bared for ultraviolent treatments. His cellphone rings and he grimaces into it: “I’m whitening!” This new millennium verb should make us cringe.

In the Seventies, we joked about the oversized “Osmochops” of the toothy Osmond family singers, and we crammed chalk-white Chiclets into our mouths to freak out our friends. Now, Chiclet teeth are expected of all of us – and, more than nose jobs or tummy tucks, it’s the cosmetic dentistry that eerily transforms the folks who put themselves through the grinder of extreme makeover shows. Anything less than veneered perfection and you look like a poor relation.

And ... let’s face it: Poverty and poor teeth do go together in this country as surely as do wealth and wonderful teeth. There’s a reason rich people look like million bucks; that is approximately what it costs to have a grin made perfect by years of good nutrition, excellent preventative dental care and corrective orthodontia. For those with less than Daddy Warbucks smiles, make no mistake: dental decay is stereotypically associated with moral decay in American pop culture. That, as a friend pointed out, is the not-so-funny premise of the joke rubber “Hillbilly teeth” sold at Halloween these days. And those extreme makeover shows know that grinding and gluing the tell-tale teeth of poverty into capped and veneered perfection is a key way to appear successful – that is to say, rich – American style.

The long view, however, is that insurance, if you have it, rarely covers such cosmetic dentistry, and the results of even the most expensive treatments are usually temporary, and often damagingly irreversible. Whiteness treatments must be boosted frequently. Porcelain veneers have to be replaced about every 10 years, since applying the things in the first place requires that the enamel be scraped from the front of your teeth. I doubt those extreme makeover shows plan to finance the expensive long-term maintenance of those pseudo-smiles they’re cheerfully handing out.

Even the over-the-counter treatments ain’t cheap. Out of cultural pressure and curiosity, I laid down nearly 40 bucks for some hideous whitening goo you daub on your teeth before you sleep – since the clandestine, shameful work of home whitening mostly happens at night, where none can see you. (And none can love you, either. With the goo on your teeth and the accompanying band-aid breath, the whitener renders a person so unappealing that they could market the stuff as an oral contraceptive.) After enduring two lonely nights of the 14-night system, the gummy whitener did little but eat away at the tender insides of my lips and cheeks, forcing me to subsist on yogurt for several days. It did keep me off coffee for 48 hours – perhaps this is, in fact, how it’s supposed to work?

I despair when I think how much money we are pouring into cosmetic fakery when what we really should focus on is better preventative dental care for everyone. Thanks to my parents’ dental insurance, I spent some time in corrective braces myself, some years ago. I resisted and resented the braces at the time – not because of the pain and humiliation involved in the old days of Spanish-Inquisition style wiring and headgear, but because I was deeply influenced by the Betsy-Tacy books for children by Maud Hart Lovelace, in which our heroine’s interestingly imperfect teeth – her gap-toothed smile – was a sign of Betsy’s difference, her specialness, one more clue about how this young girl of unique vision becomes a writer, and so a success.

Our current dental obsessions and anxieties tell a sad story of culture’s contradictions and blindnesses. We support the pricey teeth-staining Starbucks on every corner that sits under a billboard for pricey ultraviolet dental whitening. We are compelled to eat antioxidant blueberries that fight free radicals and to guzzle green tea that staves off cancer, and then somehow we expect to look as if we take nothing into our bodies with color, or with character.

But it turns out that life, friends, leaves its mark on us. And well it should.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on June 04, 2004
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