There is no clearer demonstration of the difference between America and Britain than their attitudes towards teeth. In America, you fix them. Doesn’t matter if they’re nearly straight. You subject yourself to years of semi-torture to achieve the American dream — a white picket fence of perfectly uniform teeth.
Most perfect teeth are artificial — some so artificial that they’ve entirely replaced the real ones
When I was about eleven, I was taken to the orthodontist to straighten out my slightly overlapping front teeth. I dreaded those appointments. Our orthodontist was a tall, overly friendly man with large hairy fingers which he would shove into my tiny mouth without gloves. Surely that broke protocol even back then. “They’re clean,” he’d say, as the mossy hairs on his tree-trunk fingers tickled my lips and caught between my teeth.
But hey, I got to choose the color of the torture bands which forced my baby teeth into formation. My whole mouth ached for days after each tightening. But this was just normal. Every kid I knew had a braces phase, some longer than others, and some more humiliating. One of my friends had to sleep with a head brace that looked like a wire dog muzzle. She would emerge from it in the morning looking like she’d been in a dog fight too, hair wild and matted, jaw slack and dripping saliva.
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