Metal braces are cool again with US teens and tweens

Like many middle-schoolers across the country, Madison Aballi carefully crafted her look for the first day of seventh grade.

- Jessica Shaw

To see old friends and meet new teachers, she walked into her school in Westport, Connecticut, with a new light pink North Face backpack, complete with a Labubu keychain. She carried a new-to-her iPhone 15 Pro (formerly her mother’s).

And she revealed the biggest fashion flex of 12-year-olds across the country: a new set of metal braces.

Nearly half the class, she estimated, also debuted new metal. “It’s sort of like how lots of people wear Adidas Sambas or Brandy Melville” she said. “It’s kind of another accessory at this point.”

Teens and tweens have come to embrace braces — and not just any braces. They are coveting the old-school metal variety of yesteryear.

“Kids used to come in wanting clear liners,” said Dr Sable Staller, an orthodontist in New York’s Manhattan borough. “Now, kids are like, ‘No, I want metal braces.”

Out with the popular-with-parents clear aligners, it would seem. The American Dental Association proclaimed this summer that metal braces had “never been cooler”.

The American Association of Orthodontics released a survey in 2025 showing that the number of people being treated with metal braces is on the ascent - 77 per cent in 2024, up from 75 per cent in 2022. Treatment with aligners had declined, at 23 per cent in 2024 from 25 per cent in 2022.

“We are living in a time of super-high digital technology,’ said Dr David Seligman, an orthodontist in Manhattan. So, he finds it interesting that the “analogue version of braces is what is the most cool”.

THE EMBRACE OF ‘BRACE FACE’