I’ve always loved a crooked smile. Maybe I’m an outlier, but I find it charming. Think Kirsten Dunst’s adorable snaggle tooth that she refused to fix before her Spider-Man debut. Sure, they still photoshopped them on the poster, but watching her kiss an upside-down superhero in the rain with wet hair and her idiosyncratic incisors only ramped up the rizz.
I like that bit of quirk. It staves off the homogeneity of botoxed wrinkles, stretched faces, and Hollywood smiles. In my book, there’s nothing more boring than a “perfect” face, and that’s a hill I’m willing to die on. I don’t have any issue with wanting to look your best and putting effort into that pursuit, but wanting to blend in with everyone else is a dangerous way to seek out belonging.
As a pre-teen, I had a plate to fix a massive gap between my front teeth. But as I got older, other teeth started misbehaving, and eventually I was left with a higgledy-piggledy situation that I mainly ignored. Orthodontistry was off the table because A: expensive, B: how embarrassing, C: there was no way I would voluntarily subject myself to the dentist’s chair.
If you’re unfazed by going to the dentist, I salute you. It just hasn’t been my experience. I remember dreading going to the dental van that would visit us at primary school. They tried to make the interior look fun and exciting like the mobile library, but I could never see it as anything other than a torture chamber. All that poking and prodding felt intrusive and I always left feeling like I’d done something wrong. Funnily enough, it’s the same way about visiting the gynaecologist? It’s invasive and often dehumanising having to expose your animal self to a stranger in a clinical setting.
Fast forward to adulthood, and I eventually got over myself enough to make regular dental maintenance a priority (but let’s be fair, not until my health demanded it through lots of self-inflicted drama). A big part of that was finding the right provider. I now have a dentist whom I adore and love visiting. Operatandarts is the ultimate niche practice, blending the owner’s passion for teeth with his long-term patronage of Opera and the arts. Yes, he plays opera all day, and it’s actually soothing. I look forward to chatting with him about the upcoming season and what he suggests seeing. I also trust him implicitly with my oral health. So when he pulled me aside and told me it was time to see an Orthodontist, I took the recommendation seriously.
Right now, I’m 18 months into a rigorous protocol to correct a scissor bite that’d been giving me increasingly acute jaw pain. I call it my teenage do-over. I had old-school metal braces initially, and thankfully was then able to transition to Invisalign. Plus, the silver lining was getting a cosmetic overhaul of my smile. No more snaggletooth! I still have a way to go, and I’m committed to retaining some imperfection instead of filing my teeth into oblivion/perfect symmetry, but I have to admit that the change is impressive. I smile more. I’ve quit hiding behind my hair. I feel less self-conscious on video calls or when meeting new people. Overall, it’s been an empowering experience to take care of myself and my health in this way.
I felt a bit cajoled into the whole exercise at first, because if it had been for purely aesthetic reasons, I don’t know if I would have bothered. But now, I’m beyond glad I did it. It’s given me agency, not just over how I present myself, but also to set aside fears and have the courage to move ahead. It’s something I didn’t realise I needed to prove to myself. That I’m not bad, that mistakes are not set in stone, and that even if it doesn’t feel comfortable, I can chart a new course whenever I want to.
Image credits:
I - Vanessa Paradis via Pinterest
II - via Pinterest
