I was talking to some girls I’d bumped into in my hometown when our conversation was suddenly cut short.
‘You need a rabbit’s cage for your teeth.’ Shouted a friend’s 21-year-old brother at me from a nearby bench.
For a moment I froze in shock – I couldn’t believe someone I’d never spoken to would be so happy to publicly shame me solely based on my appearance. So, feeling embarrassed and self-conscious, I made my excuses and left shortly afterwards.
I was 16 when this happened, and though my friends later told me they stuck up for me, that encounter has stayed with me ever since.
In fact, it’s just one reason that I’ve since spent £10,000 over the last 20 years on cosmetic dentistry. All because I wanted that ‘perfect Hollywood smile’.
My hatred of my appearance is in stark contrast to the attitude of Aimee Lou Wood, the actress from The White Lotus and Sex Education who, on the Jonathan Ross show last month, said it felt ‘lovely’ and like a ‘full circle moment’ to now have people celebrating her teeth after ‘being bullied forever’.
Unlike her, I have never felt empowered about the way I looked.
When I was a toddler, I broke my two front teeth in half when I bumped into a chair so they were tiny, this meant I was shocked by how different my adult teeth looked as they were so much bigger.
Much like Wood, I ended up with front teeth that protruded with a gap in the middle and I was immediately self-conscious about them.
Even though I wasn’t in the public eye, I still felt like I was being judged for the way I looked, worrying that nobody would date me because my teeth weren’t ‘perfect’. So, when I was 13, I went to the dentist in the hopes he would fix them but he told me they would move on their own.
This never happened though.
Throughout my school years I endured endless cruel jibes about my teeth: I was called ‘teeth,’ told I looked like a goldfish, and that you could drive a bus through my teeth.
As a result, I chose to hide my teeth as much as possible – I would even try not to laugh and cover my mouth with my hand while I spoke so that nobody would see them.
Like any teenager, what my peers said mattered the most to me. So though I had one friend who really loved my teeth and told me not to change them, she was the only person I knew who felt that way, so I never listened to her.
Instead, after another close friend told me that my teeth ‘weren’t the best’ and I should change them, I did.
Aged 16, I got a removable one in college. It moved them slightly but not enough and I ended up getting a fixed brace fitted at university, which cost thousands of pounds.
While it worked, and once it was taken off my teeth looked great, I was left with two permanent metal retainers, which only went on to cause more issues after they snapped off on various occasions and cut my mouth and tongue open.
Because of this, my teeth were forced into new positions, some of which were worse than before.
It was only during lockdown that I noticed that one of them was now much longer than the other, and the pain of looking at myself on Zoom calls became too much to bear.
Eventually, in desperation, I used a nail file to make them the same length again – something I whole-heartedly do not recommend.
I then had to pay thousands more for a clear brace, with fixtures attached to my teeth to keep it on.
In total, I have now spent over £10,000 on dentistry. My teeth still aren’t ‘perfect’, but I have realised, as an adult, nobody ever mentions them.
I can’t help but feel a little bit stupid about it as it truly never occurred to me that I didn’t have to spend all this time and money on one aspect of my appearance.
That’s why I’m glad Wood didn’t fall into the trap that I did – I did it all to please people that I no longer know; it gives me hope that this obsession with ‘perfect teeth’ might one day end.
However, dentistry for aesthetic reasons is still rife. Apparently, one-third of those under 35 have had a cosmetic procedure done in the past 12 months, and in 2023 there was a 10,000% increase in searches for ‘Turkey teeth’ after a series of Love Island prompted viewers to want to emulate the ‘ideal’ influencer smile.
But the thing is, these types of procedures can cause all sorts of problems like abscesses, pain, or dead teeth, with dentists in the UK left having to fix them.
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I can tell you it’s simply not worth risking your health for a set of ‘perfect teeth’.
I hope that one day, we’ll stop making comments about the appearance of others, but in the meantime I’m glad that the reaction to Wood’s natural teeth has been largely positive.
So many people compliment her teeth – one comment I read said that they make her ‘authentic and relatable’ – and despite my hatred of my own, I think that hers look great.
Wood never gave into the pressure that I did, and looking back, I wish I’d done the same.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.
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