“The white we demand in our teeth does not exist in nature”: how Hollywood established impossible dental perfection

“

Unpopular

opinion: very white teeth are rare,” writes a user of the social network Reddit.

If, in addition, all the people in a closed space have neurotically aligned teeth and exactly the same range of white, the sensation is even stranger, almost dystopian.

Another opinion, this one from Bad Bunny: ''No matter how ugly your teeth are, don't do it.

“I regret it every day of my life.”

The artist complained that it seems like “you're still not an artist until you get your teeth done.”

He said this four years ago.

It seems that the message did not sink in.

A dentist with a practice in Beverly Hills told

Allure

magazine that while watching the latest Golden Globes ceremony he did the exercise of counting how many attendees still had their natural teeth.

According to his calculation, only 20% had the teeth they had won in the genetic lottery.

It seemed to the Allure

journalist

that the dentist had miscounted.

She expected, given the glitter of the event, 99% synthetic smiles.

“His smile lit up the entire room.”

The corniest metaphor of all time is about to reach literality.

Between applause and wide, radiant smiles, the shine of altered dentures dazzles and disturbs any gala, event or awards ceremony.

White teeth are a staple in Hollywood, and therefore among celebrities and personalities of all the arts.

Any actor knows (and signs in their contract) that from the producer's office in Los Angeles they go directly to the dentist's office who will adjust the incisors and canines to the current aesthetic standards: straight, square aligned and very white.

All the same.

All over the world.

More information

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Elevating your smile to a Hollywood shine is just a routine stop on the way to a constructed and altered aesthetic that includes a change in hair color, a more stylized silhouette (with diet, exercises and a few shots of Ozempic), a fresh and rested face thanks to a few doses of neuromodulators and a more sensual mouth filled with a few vials of hyaluronic acid.

An appearance destined to please and kill any personality trait that distorts the aesthetic canon.

You will have already seen in any movie or television series that the smiles are wide, white and aligned, regardless of the socioeconomic status of the actor or the era in which the story takes place.

“What they ask of us in the consultation [increasingly whiter teeth] is the result that people perceive as aspirational on television, in series or in football games,” reflects María Rosa Fernández, orthodontic dentist and professor of the master's degree.

of

Orthodontics at the

Alfonso white, uniform and shiny.”

In a famous episode of

The Simpsons

, Lenny put on a perfect smile thinking that he would get rich and, already poor, he is unable to stop smiling and showing that blinding shine even when he is fired.

“It's the worst day of my life,” he says while smiling.

The image, 30 years later, is a common meme on the networks.

"This is the worst day of my life."

Perhaps that's why C. Tangana's crooked, naturally-toned teeth are occasionally a topic of conversation.

It is the most transgressive thing we have seen in recent times.

An aesthetic and social challenge, and a relief.

The same can be said about Samantha Hudson's or David Guapo's teeth.

“I see a vindication there,” says Elena Carrión, also an orthodontist and professor of the Master of Orthodontics at the Alfonso X el Sabio University.

Carrión and Fernández have a name for the dazzling shade of trendy teeth: “We call it

toilet white

or

Rock white

.”

“It is a color that does not exist in nature.

We work with the Vita whitening guide, a color guide inspired by the natural tones of teeth that tend to tend towards gray or yellow, and water white does not appear,” explains Carrión.

“But for people, their teeth are never white enough.

Many times they come to the consultation asking for teeth whitening but when they show you the photo of what they want you see that they are not natural teeth, but veneers,” María Rosa Fernández replies.

The issue of teeth whitening is so much in the public domain that the

Daily Mail

dedicated an article to the new teeth that Brad Pitt showed off at the 2023 Golden Globes. Three years earlier, he had recorded a visit to Kim Kardashian's dentist with the aim to maintain large, uniform teeth of a striking bluish white tone (or “pearl”, in the words of the British tabloid).

The pantone of Hollywood celebrity teeth colors is established by the so-called Marashi Collection, a collection of six 'premium' porcelain shades with names like 'Sassy Smile' or 'Undeniably White'

The dental veneer is a small sheet that can be made of porcelain or

composite

and adheres to the front of the tooth to improve its shape, color and shine, as well as to mask stains and other problems.

It is usually a quick and highly sought after aesthetic solution.

Covers or crowns are also used that cover the entire piece and are a little more invasive with the tooth, healthy or not, that is hidden.

“Most Hollywood actors have veneers or crowns,” says Mariano Abruzzesi, cosmetic dentist at SHA Wellness Clinic, adding: “With veneers you can achieve a natural appearance as long as you don't choose that nuclear target.”

Abruzzesi takes out his color guide and assures that not even the shade of the whitest veneer is that of the Hollywood smile.

"The general tendency is for the patient to want increasingly whiter teeth. I always try to remove a shade from what they have chosen and I have never managed to achieve the most extreme white because it does not seem natural to me."

Attempts to bleach a natural piece also have limits.

“There comes a time when the tooth becomes saturated, and it no longer whitens,” says the dentist.

Elena Carrión warns that we are facing a case of misleading advertising.

"It is a treatment that should be called dental lightening, not whitening, because the tooth will lighten but always from its natural tone, which tends to tend towards gray or yellow rather than white."

Judy Garland, one of Hollywood's first nuclear smiles. Herbert Dorfman (Corbis via Getty Images)

Humans' obsession with white teeth is at least 5,000 years old.

It is believed that in ancient Egypt pumice stone and vinegar were mixed to make a toothpaste with a whitening effect.

Since then, snowy teeth were a symbol of beauty, wealth and power.

In Hollywood, the craze for teeth was recorded at some point in the interwar period.

A dentist named Charles Picus “fixed” Judy Garland's smile, which must have had many spaces between her teeth, with some covers that were probably the first dental veneers in Hollywood.

He later solved the damage that James Dean did to his incisors after falling from a trapeze with the same technique.

Among his clients were Shirley Timple, Joan Crawford, Bob Hope and Walt Disney.

Having a perfect white smile began to be a possible but uncomfortable requirement to work in the cinema.

Pincus veneers were a mixture of plastic and porcelain powder that fit onto the actors' teeth and could remain in place for an indeterminate amount of time, ranging from a few hours to several days.

It was not until 1983 that a New York dentist, John Calamia, devised permanent veneers that fitted precisely and lasted for several years.

All of this assumes that porcelain dental veneers have been around for no more than four decades.

Nowadays, the unrealistic whiteness of the teeth of famous people, and of more and more ordinary people, has a lot to do with the filter of screens: the big ones, plasma and HD, and those of

smartphones

, that have imposed a demand for aesthetic perfection that has been definitively separated from nature.

The

pantone

of teeth colors of Hollywood celebrities is established by the so-called Marashi Collection, a collection of six shades of Premium porcelain with names like Sassy Smile (for former heavy smokers) or Undeniably White (Indisputably white) for those who want Light up a room with your synthetic smile.

This

pantone

was created by Jon Marashi, a cosmetic dentist from Los Angeles who is credited with Ben Affleck's new perfect smile, who in his youth sported apparently healthy teeth, but with small and somewhat separated pieces.

Marashi is said to have destroyed Joaquin Phoenix's teeth in 2019 for the

Joker

character and then fixed them again for the film's promotional tour.

If this happened it would be a true exception to the rule: white teeth are ubiquitous and above any script requirement.

We see that in

Game of Thrones

(HBO) the action takes place in the Middle Ages: there is plague, there are wars, but everyone, from the kings to the concubines, has impeccable teeth.

Something similar happens in

Euphoria,

where we find no trace of the bite and dental crowding problems that are common in adolescents, especially if they base their diet on beer and opioids.

White teeth, more than an aesthetic, are an ideology.

A test of the will and economic capacity of an individual to optimize their physical qualities with technological interventions that are more or less long and more or less painful and invasive, but effective, and with a predictable aesthetic result that can be cloned ad infinitum.

It doesn't matter that in a dark room all the teeth are white, reflective and identical.

That seems, in fact, to be the goal.

Nobody wants surprises, and teeth that have not been tamed by the orthodontist or that have not been whitened are an act of rebellion that, in some environments, can be interpreted as a sign of neglect (oh, the sacrosanct self-care!) or, what is worse: poverty. .

For now, if you are successful, as is the case with C. Tangana, and you smile and have undisciplined teeth, you have a lot of charisma.

But perhaps there are still people who do not like dystopian white teeth and, in the absence of a medical imperative, prefer their own.

Sometimes the shortest path is not the worst.

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