Reality Bites

Tooth-correcting treatments may now be as widely available as blowouts. But should we really be so eager to “fix” our smiles?

- Lena Dunham

IF YOU LOOK AT PICTURES of my mother from the 1970s, when she was roughly my age and her buckteeth overshadowed the rest of her child-size ones, we have the same jankity smile. They give me comfort, these images: She looks chic in the perfect pair of bell-bottoms, with her thick bangs hanging Ramones-heavy. Somehow, the tilted imperfection of her teeth only adds to the appeal—a balm to me, a woman for whom picket-fence incisors have never been a calling card, unless calling card means “thing you are mercilessly teased for.”

My baby teeth were straight enough. But around age six things got weird. Rather than have big-kid teeth sprout up and usurp their predecessors, I simply grew an extra row, like some wayward shark. A dentist was forced to extract the baby teeth and insert a permanent retainer that would bring my adult teeth center stage. Meanwhile, my lower jaw maintained the look of a haunted graveyard, and on top, two giant teeth up front were flanked by miniaturized canines. The look did not cement my already shaky social status. But there were always those pictures of my mother to buoy my confidence and remind me that a sixth-grader’s buckteeth could become the glamorous central focus of a fascinating face. I still came back to them as a tween, even after our goofy mouths no longer aligned, after my mother fell prey to the tug of porcelain veneers sometime in the early nineties. My grandfather, a small-time dentist with one chair in the basement of his house, insisted that he could remake her smile and therefore her life. Mine remained cartoonish and mismatched, while hers became a line of perfect Chiclets, designed to create an almost–Stepford Wife impression. Thank God she kept her nose.