September 10, 2014 • 40 mins
What "perfect" teeth look like depends on where in the world you are. In this episode, Cristen and Caroline shed light on the intersections between beauty, social status and teeth.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff Mob Never told you From how Supports
dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristin
and I'm Caroline. And today on the podcast, we're going
to talk about teeth. So many implications with teeth and beauty. Yeah,
first things first, we i e. Humans have been messing
(00:28):
around with our teeth in the form of oral modification
or dental modification. We're a long long time for all
sorts of reasons, including health reasons, beauty reasons, religious reasons, writes,
a passage, social status, etcetera. There is a world history
contained in our chompers, I know, which is so interesting
(00:52):
that we have and obviously we'll talk about this, but
we have such a history as humans of messing with
our teeth for various reasons. And like animals, you know,
like apes or ape ancestors, weren't like let me file
this down or let me pull a mohler or whatever.
You know, it's like, this is such a person thing.
Well because if I mean, we could do a whole
(01:13):
series of podcasts on body modification. But if you think
about it, humans really love messing around with their bodies,
whether it's tattooing our skin or piercing holes in ears
and other places, or in this case, messing around with
the appearance of our teeth, whether it is for health
(01:35):
or purely aesthetic purposes. Yeah. So let's go back, as
we often do, to the ancient Egyptians, who developed a
lot of dental treatments, including fillings on false teeth. So
already we're like, hey, you're missing a tooth. Better get
that fixed, Egyptians. And a little bit later on, the
very first historical record of a purely aesthetic tooth modification
(01:59):
came in the seventh century BC with the Etruscans, who
would sometimes wear these gold bands around their teeth, and
it was usually exclusively worn by women, and some people
think that they were like a form of primitive braces.
It actually might have been used to hold false teeth
(02:19):
in place. Yeah, but the false teeth weren't very convincing, right,
because they were made out of things like other animals teeth. Yeah,
now they the e Truscan false tooth technology, not not
tip top. Jenny over there is wearing that hippopotamus tooth's protruding,
(02:40):
doesn't she know? We can all tell I didn't know
Jenny was an Etruscan name. It just came out of me.
But anyway, So, these primitive types of braces have also
been found on mummies that predate the Etruscans, made out
of this thing called cat gut, which apparently is not
cat gut. Yeah, it's not the gut of a cat,
now a cat the cat and cat gut is short
(03:02):
for cattle. But a lot of times cat gut would
have been the intestines, the dried intestines of sheep or goats.
So why they didn't call it goat gut, Caroline, I
don't know. I don't know. I'm sure it was something
different in their language, probably, So why are archaeologist calling
it that? You know, I don't know. We have so
many follow up questions already. Um, But long story short,
(03:24):
we're trying to get at is the fact that we
have been wearing braces types of gear in our mouths
for a very very very long time. In the case
of the Etruscans, it was more ornamental, but there were
also practical reasons for it as well, to hold those
teeth in place, because we also didn't have things like
you know, your sonic care toothbrush and mouthwash and fluoride rints,
(03:48):
et cetera. That's right, and fancy Elizabethan ladies, they would
modify their teeth. They actually put wax balls called puffers
in place of missing teeth so that their cheeks wouldn't
appear sunken in. So this is another aesthetic, aesthetic alteration
which does remind me of when I was a kid,
when I would be losing my baby teeth if I
(04:11):
was chewing gum. This might be a very gross detail
to add. I think we all did this. Did you
make your own puffers? You kind of poke it up
into the space left by the tooth. Well, I also
stuck chicklets on my actual teeth. Oh yeah, of course,
I mean that eat to put chicklets on your teeth,
bugles on your fingers endless entertainment. Um. But yeah, So
(04:33):
there's a million different ways I mean, talk about body modification.
There's a million different ways that humans throughout history and
still today modify their smiles. And the whole point of
this is that a perfect unquote smile is culturally relative
in a lot of ways. It depends on where you are,
(04:54):
because if we go across history and also around the world,
there have been four main types of dental modification, which
includes ablation, which is intentionally removing certain teeth, filing, drilling
with inlays like putting Kesha. I believe she with the
money symbol in her name, had a little diamond put
(05:17):
into one of her teeth. That's an inlay. And also staining,
which we would think of today when we white in
our teeth. That's right, because it was the opposite way
with those silly Egyptians. They would stay in their teeth
red because they thought that the natural color of teeth
was like gross or something. Yeah, yeah, which is so
so so interesting. It's all relative, it is all relative.
(05:39):
For instance, in Japan, ancient Japan, they would blacken their
teeth for a couple of reasons. It showed a woman
had come of age, it did show wealth. But also
women in Japan would blacken their teeth to hide their
mouth expressions. It wasn't until a Japanese impress actually set
(05:59):
an example for white teeth for women that natural teeth
took off well. And that was too, if I remember
it correctly, a process of Japan intentionally wanting to become
more westernized in appearance to the outside world, and so
it was outlawed Yeah, that women even black in their teeth,
although it is still practiced among some women, like in
(06:24):
more remote areas here and there of Southeast Asia. Um.
But speaking of puffers and those Elizabethan ladies, apparently in
Elizabethan England as well, there was a brief fad of
blackening teeth. So you put your puffers in, you black
in your teeth and you go to court. That would
be horrifying. Can you imagine, like all of a sudden,
(06:46):
we live in a world where you can like teleport
back in time and you show up at the court
and you have white teeth and everyone's like embarrassaoser and
know they're like, what is she wearing? What are these pants?
These pants you speak of? And then some thing that
to me personally is more horrifying than just like blackening
your teeth, Um is the pain that would accompany getting
(07:09):
a tattoo on your gums. This has been a practice,
or had been a practice in Senegal to signal a
woman's coming of age. What is all this, all this
tooth modification to signal like sexual availability kinda yeah, sexual
availability status. Um, they're similarly um in Morocco, way back
when they would also practice gum darkening in order to
(07:32):
make their teeth appear even whiter. Now, this is something
that is still a marker of female beauty and is
a very coveted trait that is not actually a dental
modification but something that you would rather hope to be
born with. And that is the gap tooth and essentially
the having a wide space between your two front teeth,
(07:54):
and that is still a coveted trait among women in Nigeria,
Ghana and be A in particular, And there are certain
family groups who are known to have this tooth gap
and it's seemed as like the most beautiful smile a
woman could possibly have. Right, Because Orange is the new
Black actress Uzo a Dubo otherwise known as Crazy Eyes
(08:16):
in the show, she has a tooth gap. And Kristen
has a great blog post, every Stuff Mom Never Told
You dot Com that quotes her from an interview talking
about how she was begging and begging and begging to
get the gap closed up as a kid and her
mom said, look, missy, that's a history in your mouth.
That is family history in your mouth. That's how people
know our family. And it's beautiful, and so it is.
(08:40):
It is a celebration in many cultures that just happens
to be. In the West, typically we get that closed up,
although you do see some high fashion models here and
there who will have the gap tooth. And when I
was researching for that blog post, I did run across
one trend piece in The Guardian from a couple of
years back talking about how, oh, the gap tooth is
(09:03):
is the hot new thing, which I'm sure would would
make Nigerian's laugh because the hot new thing, what are
you talking about? It's always been gorgeous, but you just
because you have people like Georgia May Jagger who has
a big gap tooth, but you have Madonna to who's
had one forever. But whatever. There's also snaggle teeth which
are really popular, and they've been really popular in Japan.
(09:26):
It's this whole concept of wabby sabby, which is the
idea of finding beauty and imperfections. Yeah, and so uh,
some people might have seen this, these kinds of Japanese
trend pieces popping up in the past couple of years
about younger girls in particular going and having their teeth
like artificially kind of snaggle toothed in a way, having
(09:49):
them put into where they overlap on each other, and
it was in order to achieve this look um that's
associated with being being a younger girl. It looks very
innocent and young. Now something that would be now, something
far more painful is teeth chiseling, which is still practiced
(10:12):
by some remote tribes that particularly in Indonesia, and sometimes
it's for a coming of age. Sometimes it's something done
primarily to women to show that they have matured and
our of age. And it is exactly what it sounds like.
Either teeth chiseled into sharp points. I don't know. But
(10:33):
then there are ancient cultures also who considered sharp teeth
to be equated to like monsters and scary deities, and
so that they would file their teeth down to be
the opposite of sharp. Yeah, that's what they would do
in Bali in order to ward off negative emotions like
anger and jealousy, file those teeth down. So in terms
(10:56):
of ablation though, like we said, intentionally removing teeth the
rounda people of Australia would actually remove a tooth from
a boy's mouth as a rite of passage, and then
the boy's mom would stick the tooth in a gum tree,
and once the boy died, the tree would be stripped
of its bark. Yeah, once he once he grew up
(11:17):
and then died, and then I guess that would be
part of the funeral rites. Interesting, his tooth tree would
be stripped. So all sorts of fascinating dental modifications going
on in all sorts of cultures around the world, which
brings us to what we think of as the perfect
smile by Western standards today, which is very white and
(11:42):
very straight. And the history of how we whitened and
straightened our teeth is also pretty fascinating. So when it
comes to how we began brushing our teeth every day
twice a day and flossing. Uh. From medieval times through
the Renaissance, tooth cleaning, as you would probably guess, was
(12:04):
very d I y. You would essentially wipe them down
with a cloth. You might switch around with vinegar or wine,
which I don't I don't know, maybe I hope it
was white wine. And then you might chew on things
like mint, rosemary or other fragrant herbs in order to
freshen your breath. Because they did not have proper toothbrushes
(12:26):
and toothpaste, Some of them had a semi proper toothbrush
because in the seventeenth century, uh, some people were using
a bristle brush for their teeth that came to Europe
from China. Yeah, and then fast forward to eight fifty
seven when the first toothbrush is patented, and then in
(12:46):
the eighties the first electronic toothbrush, Surprise, Surprise, is sold.
And then soon after in the eighteen nineties, we get
dental floss. Something that I neglected to google and I
totally wanted to and should have is that first electronic toothbrush.
I want to see what it looks like because I
imagine it to be like this huge contraption with a
giant plug or whatever. I don't know, something like a
(13:09):
torture device. But I need to do that mental note,
I'll do that. Like, I feel like it was probably
really dangerous to use, just because it would have been
presumably close to water and thinking about electricity at that time. Yeah,
needed needed a lot of safety instructions. Um. But so
when we move into the twentieth century, we we get
(13:31):
a huge uptick in the pace of our dental technology,
and bright white teeth gradually become the standard. We have
obviously moved away from red Egyptian teeth and black Japanese teeth,
but it still wasn't until after World War Two the
teeth brushing in the US really became a thing, yeah,
because soldiers were instructed to brush your teeth to avoid
(13:55):
getting something called trench mouth. But we should note that
William Colgate and Company that name probably rings a brand
name bill to a lot of listeners, began selling toothpaste
in the US in the late eight hundred, so it
was around. It probably just wasn't in every single home because,
as we'll talk about more later in the podcast, higher
end dental care and having things that we would think
(14:17):
of today is being so basic as a toothbrush and
toothpaste have largely been related to class in your financial situation, right,
and so I mean speaking of money by Americans, we're
spending three hundred and eighty three million dollars per year
on over the counter whitening products. I had to stop
(14:38):
using whitening stuff because it was like my gums are
not It was not good for me. So now I
have to use sensidine stuff type toothpaste because my teeth
were getting too sensitive from whitening cautionary tale from Caroline.
I know the cycle of the cycle of whitening. But
fast forward to and the New York Times was reporting
(14:59):
on cause medic dental ceramist having to make sure that
their veneers didn't look too perfect, because we've been pursuing
these white, white, white, perfect, perfect teeth for so many years,
and suddenly people are like, your teeth just look fake.
I want real looking teeth. And so now if you're
showing up anywhere from seven veneers, if you have the means,
(15:22):
a lot of people are asking for slightly like tinted
veneers that that look more realistic. Yeah, And and the
funny thing about it is, first of all, just the
fact that this trend piece exists, and they were able
to interview these dentists who were scoffing at how white
some people's veneers are, because these wealthy clients usually would
(15:44):
walk into the dentist's office and want a look that
they saw in a Hollywood tabloid. But the dentists were like,
what you don't realize is that when those paparazzi photos
are being taken, our red carpet photos are being taken.
A flash from the cameras is reflecting off of the teeth,
(16:05):
making them appear even whiter than they normally are. So
if you get teeth that are as white as you
see in US Weekly and People magazine, then they will
be almost blindingly white, which does hearken my brain back
to that episode and Friends when Ross gets I think
(16:25):
it's teeth white and in their way too white, and
I now feel old for your friends joke. It's distracting.
Like talking to someone whose teeth are obviously like super
super white. I can't help but stare at their mouth.
It's incredible that we're to this point where your teeth
can be too white and too perfect. We have jumped
the shark. But in addition to the pursuit of white,
(16:46):
there's also been the pursuit of the straight teeth, and
so we have a brief history of braces, which, fun fact,
barbers were the first dentist, didn't you know when you
go to the barber, that's where you'd also go to
get a bad tooth pulled way back in the day.
So it is a good thing that oral technology has
come the long way that it has. But orthodongia actually
(17:10):
took off in the eighteenth century, which isn't so surprising
that it's been around that long when you think about
the fact that those of Truscan women were wearing those
gold bands, and the mummies had primitive braces on as well.
Cat gut o cat good. Well, it's actually some French
folks who took us far far from cat gut uh
to more modern braces, so kind of In seventeen eight,
(17:34):
French dentist Pierre Fouchard published a book called The Surgeon Dentist,
which described what sounds terribly painful. It's some kind of
device called a band and braces. The brace technology really
didn't change all that much up until the nineteen fifties. Yeah,
and this brief history, by the way, is coming from
(17:55):
the fabulous folks at Mental Floss. And after the fifties
you have an accelerated pace of orthodontia technology. So by
the mid seventies orthodontists had figured out how to put
those brackets on the front of our teeth, and then
by the eighties they figured out this is how we
put them on the back of our teeth. And so
(18:18):
by the nineteen nineties, around a third of us kids
are getting braces. And now I feel like It's almost
a standard almost box you check where once you have
a kid you start taking to the dentist, it's like, well,
will he or she get braces or not? Yeah, I
never had braces. I had them on my bottom teeth.
(18:38):
They they wanted to wait to put them on my
top teeth because they wanted to break my jaw and
bring it forward because I have an overbite. But I
was like, I'm not gonna let you do that. You
don't know this yet, but I'm not going to let
you do that. So I never end up getting braces
on my top teeth, and they look great, beautiful teeth.
I feel like they're better from this side. I'm turning
my left side to Kristen because this side have a
(19:00):
crooked tooth, and today is the day I learned that
Caroline has a preferred tooth side I do so when
the paparazzi finally find me down here in Atlanta, you'll
know his side to turn. Take the picture from the left. Well,
the whole reason why we were even inspired to do
this episode on teeth is that when it comes to
braces in particular, it's far alikelier that little Janey's gonna
(19:24):
get braces compared to Little Johnny, or that she is
going to want braces, that she's gonna look in the
mirror and see her teeth and think those are not
up to snuff. Now, going back to earlier in the podcast,
when we were taking a trip around the world with
different forms of dental modification, there were some that were
exclusively targeted to women in those cultures, such as the
(19:49):
tooth blackening in Japan and tooth chiseling among certain groups.
But also now today braces tend to happen more often
among girls. It's really interesting looking at girls and also
their parents wanting girls to get braces. But there was
a study that looked at the factors that go into children,
(20:14):
young people, teens wanting UH dental therapy of of several
different kinds, and they found that the two main predictors
were psychological elements and female gender. So just simply being
a girl is a huge predictor of seeking things like
braces or other orthodontia or teeth whitening. Yeah, And that
(20:36):
study was linked to in an article by sociologist Philip
Cohen who noticed a stark gender gap in braces and
he wrote about it for sociological images, which was then
cross posted to a Pacific Standard magazine, and he found
looking at a bunch of studies, the girls are twice
as likely than boys to say that they don't like
(20:57):
their teeth and want braces, even said, just google image
braces and about of the photos that come up are all,
you know, stock images of girls with braces on. And
there was even uh, I don't know why it gave
me the heavy geeps, but if you go on Pinterest,
(21:19):
because I'm kind of gotten to a bit of an
Internet rabbit hole looking at uh, images of braces, you know,
kids embraces to see whether you know, what Cohen said
holds up, and it so does. If you go over
to Pinterest, there are so many pin boards just of
girls embraces. Why, I don't know. I think it's some
(21:39):
of its fashion, you know, for girls, you know, to
be proud of their braces, like beautiful with braces. But
it's definitely it's definitely a thing. Go on Pinterest and
you know, you don't have to take my word for it, um,
but this was something too that he found not just
in the US, but also abroad. Yeah, Samon in um,
(22:00):
England and Germany, that girls are more likely to get braces,
same with adult women. Um. Another Google search was, uh,
if you google mother daughter braces he was talking about,
you get pictures of mothers and daughters getting braces together.
But if you google father son braces, it brings you
(22:20):
to practices orthodonist offices run by fathers and sons. Yeah,
because adult braces have become more common in recent years,
and even among that you know clientele demographic, it tends
to skew female. And I went to the dentist a
couple of years ago and was so surprised because I
(22:43):
grew up had a great dentist and was never recommended
for braces. And I don't have a completely perfectly straight
mouth of teeth. But that is fine. They're they're like whatever.
And one of the first things she said was have
you ever considered braces? What? Yeah, she was like, if
you if you just wear these invisible line, no one
(23:04):
will even be able to go. No. No, that is
just such a sales pitch. They're just trying to make
money because dental costs are spiraling and they're not getting
all their money back from medicaid, and so they just
want to make their money through invisible line. Well, jokes
on you, Caroline, because she was right, you can't see
my invisible because they're in right now. No I don't.
I don't have them. Yeah, it did feel it. It
(23:27):
was a peculiar sales pitch to get. And I wonder
if a guy who walked in with my teeth and
my bite, which yes it is a perfect bite, oh good,
if she would have recommended that to him. I don't know.
Higher expectations for women, um so well, And that's what
Cohen thinks. The sociologists we talked about. He thinks that
(23:47):
it has a lot to do with these higher standards
and higher expectations for female beauty because more girls getting
bracest has absolutely nothing to do with more more girls
needed braces. They're also studies that he looked at comparing
whether kids were getting braces purely for aesthetic reasons or
(24:09):
because they did have some kind of dental alignment issue
that needed to be corrected, and overwhelmingly girls were likelier
to get them for purely aesthetic reasons. Right, But he
was also talking about how in reality, boys and girls
have equal need for braces among children who need them
to correct a problem or whatever. Straighten teeth, whatever, the
(24:30):
need is equal, but girls perception of their need is
way greater. Um he found that among girls who get braces,
their actual need is low. And like we said, with
adult braces, that's a trend that continues into adulthood, and
that includes cosmetic surgery. Women are much more likely to
get various types of cosmetic surgery into adulthood. Two. And
that goes back to expectations of how girls look. Yeah,
(24:53):
there was a survey from the American Academy of Cosmetic
Dentistry which found the eighty four percent of women reported
that they would pay money to improve the appearance of
their teeth compared to of men, and that was linked
to from a blog post over at the Beheld written
by Autumn Whitefield Madrono past Stuff Mom Never Told You
(25:15):
guessed who was wondering in this post whether the gender
gap is due to, yes, those higher beauty standards for
women and the way she put it so well that
average teeth on men are considered more acceptable than average
teeth on women. And the thing that got her thinking
about it at least in this post was Will Ferrell's teeth.
(25:36):
She was watching Anchorman and if you've watched anchor Man
or seen you know, anything with Will Ferrell, and it
you'll see that he does not he has pretty His
lower teeth in particular, are not all in the straight line,
let's put it that way. But you would never see.
I can't think of a single woman I've seen on
(25:57):
television who has that noticeably crooked teeth. And I think,
and this is just a hypothesis, but I think that
if you did, it would be because some messages being
played up that this woman was a quote unquote hillbilly,
or she was poor or something that if a woman's
teeth looked like that on television or in the movies,
it's to deliver a certain message about her, whereas that's
(26:18):
just that's just full Ferrel's teeth. Well, and that's the thing,
because the more we read about teeth, the more it
became apparent that even more than gender, these days, class
and social status are so closely associated with the status
of your teeth because you know, going way back in
time to you know, those Elizabethan women of means, they
(26:41):
would have those puffers to make sure that their cheeks
puffed out in the correct kind of way, and they
would have access to whatever sort of early dental care
was available, not so for the lower classes. And that's
something though, of poorer people not having access to dental
health care that remains today right. Um, And there was
(27:07):
a two thousand eight study in the journal Nature that
talked about the negative judgments that we lobb against people
who have teeth that are darker or more decayed. The
darker or more decayed they are, the more negative our
judgments are in terms of things like social competence, intellectual ability,
psychological adjustment, and relationship satisfaction. It's sort of a visible
(27:30):
sign of inadequate access to healthcare and to taking care
of oneself well. And I think there are more assumptions
about the taking care of oneself part that um that
really stands out because gender in this case did not
have a significant effect. If you have decaying teeth, missing teeth,
(27:51):
it has an equally negative impact on how people perceive you.
And I mean especially for missing teeth, if you lose
a tooth. Um, I've had a situation where I've shipped
a tooth before and you know, walked around for a
week with a little snaggle tooth and I knew it
was going to be fixed, but it drew so much
attention just because of one. Yeah, because you don't expect
(28:15):
to see this. You know, we have this idea that
you should have white, straight, perfect teeth because that signals
that you take care of yourself, that you have the
you know, the money to pay for dental visits, that
you might have had braces when you were a kid,
that you don't have some kind of drug habit, that
you don't smoke, et cetera. Right, But we don't automatically think, oh,
(28:35):
that girl has good health insurance and doesn't smoke or
do meth. We it's just sort of tied up in
our assumptions about, oh, like you said, taking care of
yourself exactly. And the perfect character on Internet TV, because
I don't know if you can call Netflix TV TV
who embodies this is Pensent Tucky on Orange is the
New Black who has those stereotypical, it out meth teeth,
(29:02):
and it's so much a part of her character as
well as that entire group on Orange is a New
Black that she's a part of that we all assume,
you know, have had meth problems in the past, and
so they have these rotted out teeth. But when she
returns with corrected teeth all of a sudden, she's too
big for britches and everybody thinks that she thinks she's
too good for them. Yeah, but with the with the
(29:24):
rotted out teeth, it's the signaling that she has little education,
she's not very smart, she had a drug habit. You know,
it's like or even during uh in Halloween times when
you know they're all of those false teeth at the
costume store, there's always a hillbilly teeth and they're you know,
poking out, they're missing, they're yellow, they're rotting right, And
(29:45):
speaking to the Telegraph, Malcolm Gladwell actually cited teeth as
the emerging social status signal between rich important. He equated
them and the issue of basically dental hygiene and your
teeth appear with obesity problems in terms of what they signal. Yeah,
he said, there's symptoms of the same set of inferences
(30:07):
that are being drawn. So from his logic, the same
way that obesity often is associated with having poor lifestyle habits,
we place the same set of negative social assumptions and
stigmas onto people who have less than perfect looking teeth.
And this is happening while the sort of Hollywood projected
(30:31):
standards for what your teeth should look like only you know,
continue to increase. Everyone has white, perfect teeth when you
flip through a magazine these days. But it's astonishing when
you look at the US, just the lack of oral healthcare,
because even with Obamacare and universal healthcare, there's still a
(30:53):
massive gap when it comes to dental coverage. There are
around one hundred thirty mill in Americans around forty of
the population with zero dental coverage. Yeah, and forty five
million Americans actually live nowhere near a dentist, And it
seems like in terms of health care and dental care,
(31:14):
dental is often almost like an afterthought because a lot
of people who do have health insurance still don't have
dental In two thousand and eight, for instance, a quarter
of Americans under sixty five had no dental coverage. And
having dental coverage tends to be correlated with income and education,
So people who have a college education, that's a big
(31:35):
predictor of whether you will actually have dental coverage, but
that definitely doesn't mean that everyone's going to have it.
And even with things like Medicaid and medicare, the dental
provisions are minimal at best. There is a statistic, I
think coming from the Pew Research Center which found that
in two thousand eleven, over half of all kids covered
(31:56):
by Medicaid received no dental care, which my have had
to do with where they are living, because there are
these massive geographical areas all around the US that have
no you know, dental practices, because setting up a thriving
dental practice can actually be challenging if you're not in
a large metropolitan area. But even for poor people over
(32:18):
twenty one who can get access to Medicaid, the only
dental care they can get applies to emergency dental treatments,
and even then it's paid for only on a state
by state basis. Yeah, so I mean in terms of price,
the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that average out of
pocket dental costs are eight hundred and seventy three dollars.
(32:40):
So basically, dental care for a lot of people, a
lot of people is becoming a luxury. And you have
the costs of dental care outpacing both the rate of
inflation and overall medical cost increases across the board. Well,
and think about it too, as you get older, you
probably need to take even better air of your teeth.
(33:01):
But when it comes to Medicare for the elderly, they
only get coverage for again, emergency dental procedures. It doesn't
even cover dentures um. So it's a little wonder then
that in two thousand nine, eight hundred thirty thousand and
fifty Americans went to the er for preventable dental problems
(33:21):
because I mean, what else are they going to do?
They can't there's nowhere else to go. Yeah. Yeah, And
and it's especially bad when you realize, and a lot
of people might not realize that poor dental health is
linked to a lot of other health problems. My father,
who has heart issues, totally preaches that people need to floss.
(33:45):
It's a huge thing for him because dental bacteria is
linked to things like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and pneumonia, preterm birth.
I mean, you wouldn't think it. You're like, oh, I
had some cheesy poofs and I'm just gonna fall asleep
and not worry about it. No brush those teeth. Russia's
jeezy poofs out. But if you are living in a
paycheck to paycheck situation or even less than clearly. You
(34:10):
know what was that eight seventy three dollars average out
of cost dental care. If you don't have insurance, that's
going to be the last thing that you're going to
pay for most likely, unless you it is to the
point to where you are in such extreme pain that
you probably will have to go to the emergency room.
So it's something that we don't think about very often
(34:31):
at all when we just see these celebrities walking down
the red carpet with these perfectly imperfect veneers that they've
gotten for thousands of dollars, that this is actually a
huge issue and there's so much social class tied up
with that. So this modern day quest for a quote
(34:52):
unquote perfect smile is about so much more than looking good.
I mean, this is about basic healthcare that people are
missing out on. Okay, So now that we have thrown
a bunch of these stats that you I'm I'm interested
in hearing from listeners who maybe have felt discrimination based
on their appearance there, especially their teeth appearance. I have
(35:15):
a friend who got a tooth knocked out in a
freak accident, and he didn't worry about getting it replaced
for a while because of money issues. But then it
came time to do job interviews and it's like it's
not going to happen. Not in the back of his
mouth either, it's one of his front teeth, and he's like,
I've got to go show out some big bucks now
to get a to get a fake tooth so that
(35:35):
I can get a job. Yeah. Absolutely so. Um, if
you've experienced these kinds of things, or if you are
perhaps a social worker who works with lower income communities
on to target these kinds of dental issues, we particularly
want to hear from you because there is so much
(35:55):
more to our teeth than whether or not we just
have perfect straight white paparazzi ready choppers. Remember shoot me
from the left, yes. And and by the way, if
you also are a paparazzo, shoot Caroline from the left
with a camera. Yes, with a camera. So send us
(36:15):
all of your thoughts on teeth. Mom Stuff at how
stuffworks dot com is our email address, and you can
also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast or messages on Facebook.
And we have a couple of messages to share with
you right now about insomnia. Well, I have a letter
here from Cindy. She says, I was so glad to
(36:37):
hear your podcast on Lady Insomnia, more specifically the idea
that the sleep wake sleep cycle maybe a natural occurrence
and one our ancestors regularly experienced. In the past, I
quote unquote struggled with insomnia, becoming frustrated and anxious when
I would go through periods of awakening for several hours
in the night, for many nights in a row. My
(36:58):
anxiety would put me into that anxiety loop you spoke of. Recently,
I heard about Ben Franklin's nighttime adventures. I heard that
Mark Twain also experienced great creativity in the night. I
realized that I, too, maybe just one of the great snicker.
I decided to accept night weights as normal and see
what that attitude shift might do for me. It has
been great, although there have still been a few times
(37:20):
when my wakefulness seemed more exhausting and less enlightening. For
the most part, I now accept my night weights as
a time of peaceful reflection or, let's be honest, facebook
alone time. I generally give myself one or two hours
in the night of wakefulness before I shut the iPad
and attempt to sleep again. Usually that's all it takes
sometimes I wake again and go through my wake cycle
(37:41):
once more, but usually not. I awake with less frustrated
anxiety and feel more rested than when I got the
same amount or lack of sleep but was angry about it.
I completely agree that some forms of insomnia are much
worse than mine and much more crazy making. However, much
like accepting the pain of childbirth as normal and therefore
fearing it less even though it still hurts my accepting
(38:03):
this sleep wake sleep cycle as natural does not change it,
but it changes my attitude toward it and therefore makes
it less grading usually on my soul. So thank you
for sharing your experience. Then, I also thought about trying
out that sleep wake sleep thing, but I end up
just lying in bed sad well. I also have a
letter here from c J about insomnia, and though the
(38:23):
whole thing is too long to share, I did want
to share some of it. C J writes, after a
certain point, I kind of gave up on trying to
conform myself to what is considered normal and quit inflicting
the belief of others that it was somehow a huge
failing of mine that I couldn't fall asleep by eleven PM,
or fall asleep within fifteen minutes of going to bed.
(38:44):
Society has very little sympathy for you if you don't
wake up early on a permanent basis. Schools and most
jobs start in early morning hours. In our society is
permeated with the thought that the early bird gets the worm.
I learned long ago not to mention my sleep problems
because the most common or sponse I get is along
the lines of you must really like to stay out
late partying, which couldn't be further from the truth. Recently,
(39:08):
I saw new advice for taking melatonin using a formula
based on when you wanted to get up. This new
advice times by Meltonian taking closer to eight pm, rather
than the previous advice for my doctors, which was to
take it right before I went to bed. This method
of taking the melitone in earlier, along with the other
things I do, like trying to wake up at similar
times every day, avoiding blue light in the evening, avoiding
(39:28):
eating late, getting exercise, and not doing other things in
my bedroom, etcetera, has allowed for my best time so
far in terms of sleep. Over the last twenty years
or so, I've usually been able to follow sleep around
one am, and I can also get to my current
job around nine am, so I've been able to get
around seven hours of sleep on a somewhat regular basis,
which is pretty darn good for me. With taking the
(39:49):
melitone in early for the first time in my life,
I actually feel a little more normal because I usually
feel sleepy before I go to bed, which I never
did before. Sleepy, physically tired or unfortunately two different things.
And I don't feel like the walking dead most of
the time. So I would encourage people to try and
get treatment, maybe because it can help, but also don't
(40:10):
beat yourself up if it doesn't work as well as
you'd hope. Maybe try working your life more around the
insomnia rather than the other way around. And for those
of you without insomnia, I'd be grateful and please have
a little more sympathy for us night owls. So thanks
c J and thanks to everybody who's written into us.
Mom stuff at how Stuff Works dot Com is our
email address and for links to all of our social
(40:31):
media's as well as all of our blog posts, videos,
and podcasts. There's one place to go, and it's Stuff
Mom Never Told You dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, doesn't how stuff works. Dot
com
Welcome to stuff Mob Never told you From how Supports
dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristin
and I'm Caroline. And today on the podcast, we're going
to talk about teeth. So many implications with teeth and beauty. Yeah,
first things first, we i e. Humans have been messing
(00:28):
around with our teeth in the form of oral modification
or dental modification. We're a long long time for all
sorts of reasons, including health reasons, beauty reasons, religious reasons, writes,
a passage, social status, etcetera. There is a world history
contained in our chompers, I know, which is so interesting
(00:52):
that we have and obviously we'll talk about this, but
we have such a history as humans of messing with
our teeth for various reasons. And like animals, you know,
like apes or ape ancestors, weren't like let me file
this down or let me pull a mohler or whatever.
You know, it's like, this is such a person thing.
Well because if I mean, we could do a whole
(01:13):
series of podcasts on body modification. But if you think
about it, humans really love messing around with their bodies,
whether it's tattooing our skin or piercing holes in ears
and other places, or in this case, messing around with
the appearance of our teeth, whether it is for health
(01:35):
or purely aesthetic purposes. Yeah. So let's go back, as
we often do, to the ancient Egyptians, who developed a
lot of dental treatments, including fillings on false teeth. So
already we're like, hey, you're missing a tooth. Better get
that fixed, Egyptians. And a little bit later on, the
very first historical record of a purely aesthetic tooth modification
(01:59):
came in the seventh century BC with the Etruscans, who
would sometimes wear these gold bands around their teeth, and
it was usually exclusively worn by women, and some people
think that they were like a form of primitive braces.
It actually might have been used to hold false teeth
(02:19):
in place. Yeah, but the false teeth weren't very convincing, right,
because they were made out of things like other animals teeth. Yeah,
now they the e Truscan false tooth technology, not not
tip top. Jenny over there is wearing that hippopotamus tooth's protruding,
(02:40):
doesn't she know? We can all tell I didn't know
Jenny was an Etruscan name. It just came out of me.
But anyway, So, these primitive types of braces have also
been found on mummies that predate the Etruscans, made out
of this thing called cat gut, which apparently is not
cat gut. Yeah, it's not the gut of a cat,
now a cat the cat and cat gut is short
(03:02):
for cattle. But a lot of times cat gut would
have been the intestines, the dried intestines of sheep or goats.
So why they didn't call it goat gut, Caroline, I
don't know. I don't know. I'm sure it was something
different in their language, probably, So why are archaeologist calling
it that? You know, I don't know. We have so
many follow up questions already. Um, But long story short,
(03:24):
we're trying to get at is the fact that we
have been wearing braces types of gear in our mouths
for a very very very long time. In the case
of the Etruscans, it was more ornamental, but there were
also practical reasons for it as well, to hold those
teeth in place, because we also didn't have things like
you know, your sonic care toothbrush and mouthwash and fluoride rints,
(03:48):
et cetera. That's right, and fancy Elizabethan ladies, they would
modify their teeth. They actually put wax balls called puffers
in place of missing teeth so that their cheeks wouldn't
appear sunken in. So this is another aesthetic, aesthetic alteration
which does remind me of when I was a kid,
when I would be losing my baby teeth if I
(04:11):
was chewing gum. This might be a very gross detail
to add. I think we all did this. Did you
make your own puffers? You kind of poke it up
into the space left by the tooth. Well, I also
stuck chicklets on my actual teeth. Oh yeah, of course,
I mean that eat to put chicklets on your teeth,
bugles on your fingers endless entertainment. Um. But yeah, So
(04:33):
there's a million different ways I mean, talk about body modification.
There's a million different ways that humans throughout history and
still today modify their smiles. And the whole point of
this is that a perfect unquote smile is culturally relative
in a lot of ways. It depends on where you are,
(04:54):
because if we go across history and also around the world,
there have been four main types of dental modification, which
includes ablation, which is intentionally removing certain teeth, filing, drilling
with inlays like putting Kesha. I believe she with the
money symbol in her name, had a little diamond put
(05:17):
into one of her teeth. That's an inlay. And also staining,
which we would think of today when we white in
our teeth. That's right, because it was the opposite way
with those silly Egyptians. They would stay in their teeth
red because they thought that the natural color of teeth
was like gross or something. Yeah, yeah, which is so
so so interesting. It's all relative, it is all relative.
(05:39):
For instance, in Japan, ancient Japan, they would blacken their
teeth for a couple of reasons. It showed a woman
had come of age, it did show wealth. But also
women in Japan would blacken their teeth to hide their
mouth expressions. It wasn't until a Japanese impress actually set
(05:59):
an example for white teeth for women that natural teeth
took off well. And that was too, if I remember
it correctly, a process of Japan intentionally wanting to become
more westernized in appearance to the outside world, and so
it was outlawed Yeah, that women even black in their teeth,
although it is still practiced among some women, like in
(06:24):
more remote areas here and there of Southeast Asia. Um.
But speaking of puffers and those Elizabethan ladies, apparently in
Elizabethan England as well, there was a brief fad of
blackening teeth. So you put your puffers in, you black
in your teeth and you go to court. That would
be horrifying. Can you imagine, like all of a sudden,
(06:46):
we live in a world where you can like teleport
back in time and you show up at the court
and you have white teeth and everyone's like embarrassaoser and
know they're like, what is she wearing? What are these pants?
These pants you speak of? And then some thing that
to me personally is more horrifying than just like blackening
your teeth, Um is the pain that would accompany getting
(07:09):
a tattoo on your gums. This has been a practice,
or had been a practice in Senegal to signal a
woman's coming of age. What is all this, all this
tooth modification to signal like sexual availability kinda yeah, sexual
availability status. Um, they're similarly um in Morocco, way back
when they would also practice gum darkening in order to
(07:32):
make their teeth appear even whiter. Now, this is something
that is still a marker of female beauty and is
a very coveted trait that is not actually a dental
modification but something that you would rather hope to be
born with. And that is the gap tooth and essentially
the having a wide space between your two front teeth,
(07:54):
and that is still a coveted trait among women in Nigeria,
Ghana and be A in particular, And there are certain
family groups who are known to have this tooth gap
and it's seemed as like the most beautiful smile a
woman could possibly have. Right, Because Orange is the new
Black actress Uzo a Dubo otherwise known as Crazy Eyes
(08:16):
in the show, she has a tooth gap. And Kristen
has a great blog post, every Stuff Mom Never Told
You dot Com that quotes her from an interview talking
about how she was begging and begging and begging to
get the gap closed up as a kid and her
mom said, look, missy, that's a history in your mouth.
That is family history in your mouth. That's how people
know our family. And it's beautiful, and so it is.
(08:40):
It is a celebration in many cultures that just happens
to be. In the West, typically we get that closed up,
although you do see some high fashion models here and
there who will have the gap tooth. And when I
was researching for that blog post, I did run across
one trend piece in The Guardian from a couple of
years back talking about how, oh, the gap tooth is
(09:03):
is the hot new thing, which I'm sure would would
make Nigerian's laugh because the hot new thing, what are
you talking about? It's always been gorgeous, but you just
because you have people like Georgia May Jagger who has
a big gap tooth, but you have Madonna to who's
had one forever. But whatever. There's also snaggle teeth which
are really popular, and they've been really popular in Japan.
(09:26):
It's this whole concept of wabby sabby, which is the
idea of finding beauty and imperfections. Yeah, and so uh,
some people might have seen this, these kinds of Japanese
trend pieces popping up in the past couple of years
about younger girls in particular going and having their teeth
like artificially kind of snaggle toothed in a way, having
(09:49):
them put into where they overlap on each other, and
it was in order to achieve this look um that's
associated with being being a younger girl. It looks very
innocent and young. Now something that would be now, something
far more painful is teeth chiseling, which is still practiced
(10:12):
by some remote tribes that particularly in Indonesia, and sometimes
it's for a coming of age. Sometimes it's something done
primarily to women to show that they have matured and
our of age. And it is exactly what it sounds like.
Either teeth chiseled into sharp points. I don't know. But
(10:33):
then there are ancient cultures also who considered sharp teeth
to be equated to like monsters and scary deities, and
so that they would file their teeth down to be
the opposite of sharp. Yeah, that's what they would do
in Bali in order to ward off negative emotions like
anger and jealousy, file those teeth down. So in terms
(10:56):
of ablation though, like we said, intentionally removing teeth the
rounda people of Australia would actually remove a tooth from
a boy's mouth as a rite of passage, and then
the boy's mom would stick the tooth in a gum tree,
and once the boy died, the tree would be stripped
of its bark. Yeah, once he once he grew up
(11:17):
and then died, and then I guess that would be
part of the funeral rites. Interesting, his tooth tree would
be stripped. So all sorts of fascinating dental modifications going
on in all sorts of cultures around the world, which
brings us to what we think of as the perfect
smile by Western standards today, which is very white and
(11:42):
very straight. And the history of how we whitened and
straightened our teeth is also pretty fascinating. So when it
comes to how we began brushing our teeth every day
twice a day and flossing. Uh. From medieval times through
the Renaissance, tooth cleaning, as you would probably guess, was
(12:04):
very d I y. You would essentially wipe them down
with a cloth. You might switch around with vinegar or wine,
which I don't I don't know, maybe I hope it
was white wine. And then you might chew on things
like mint, rosemary or other fragrant herbs in order to
freshen your breath. Because they did not have proper toothbrushes
(12:26):
and toothpaste, Some of them had a semi proper toothbrush
because in the seventeenth century, uh, some people were using
a bristle brush for their teeth that came to Europe
from China. Yeah, and then fast forward to eight fifty
seven when the first toothbrush is patented, and then in
(12:46):
the eighties the first electronic toothbrush, Surprise, Surprise, is sold.
And then soon after in the eighteen nineties, we get
dental floss. Something that I neglected to google and I
totally wanted to and should have is that first electronic toothbrush.
I want to see what it looks like because I
imagine it to be like this huge contraption with a
giant plug or whatever. I don't know, something like a
(13:09):
torture device. But I need to do that mental note,
I'll do that. Like, I feel like it was probably
really dangerous to use, just because it would have been
presumably close to water and thinking about electricity at that time. Yeah,
needed needed a lot of safety instructions. Um. But so
when we move into the twentieth century, we we get
(13:31):
a huge uptick in the pace of our dental technology,
and bright white teeth gradually become the standard. We have
obviously moved away from red Egyptian teeth and black Japanese teeth,
but it still wasn't until after World War Two the
teeth brushing in the US really became a thing, yeah,
because soldiers were instructed to brush your teeth to avoid
(13:55):
getting something called trench mouth. But we should note that
William Colgate and Company that name probably rings a brand
name bill to a lot of listeners, began selling toothpaste
in the US in the late eight hundred, so it
was around. It probably just wasn't in every single home because,
as we'll talk about more later in the podcast, higher
end dental care and having things that we would think
(14:17):
of today is being so basic as a toothbrush and
toothpaste have largely been related to class in your financial situation, right,
and so I mean speaking of money by Americans, we're
spending three hundred and eighty three million dollars per year
on over the counter whitening products. I had to stop
(14:38):
using whitening stuff because it was like my gums are
not It was not good for me. So now I
have to use sensidine stuff type toothpaste because my teeth
were getting too sensitive from whitening cautionary tale from Caroline.
I know the cycle of the cycle of whitening. But
fast forward to and the New York Times was reporting
(14:59):
on cause medic dental ceramist having to make sure that
their veneers didn't look too perfect, because we've been pursuing
these white, white, white, perfect, perfect teeth for so many years,
and suddenly people are like, your teeth just look fake.
I want real looking teeth. And so now if you're
showing up anywhere from seven veneers, if you have the means,
(15:22):
a lot of people are asking for slightly like tinted
veneers that that look more realistic. Yeah, And and the
funny thing about it is, first of all, just the
fact that this trend piece exists, and they were able
to interview these dentists who were scoffing at how white
some people's veneers are, because these wealthy clients usually would
(15:44):
walk into the dentist's office and want a look that
they saw in a Hollywood tabloid. But the dentists were like,
what you don't realize is that when those paparazzi photos
are being taken, our red carpet photos are being taken.
A flash from the cameras is reflecting off of the teeth,
(16:05):
making them appear even whiter than they normally are. So
if you get teeth that are as white as you
see in US Weekly and People magazine, then they will
be almost blindingly white, which does hearken my brain back
to that episode and Friends when Ross gets I think
(16:25):
it's teeth white and in their way too white, and
I now feel old for your friends joke. It's distracting.
Like talking to someone whose teeth are obviously like super
super white. I can't help but stare at their mouth.
It's incredible that we're to this point where your teeth
can be too white and too perfect. We have jumped
the shark. But in addition to the pursuit of white,
(16:46):
there's also been the pursuit of the straight teeth, and
so we have a brief history of braces, which, fun fact,
barbers were the first dentist, didn't you know when you
go to the barber, that's where you'd also go to
get a bad tooth pulled way back in the day.
So it is a good thing that oral technology has
come the long way that it has. But orthodongia actually
(17:10):
took off in the eighteenth century, which isn't so surprising
that it's been around that long when you think about
the fact that those of Truscan women were wearing those
gold bands, and the mummies had primitive braces on as well.
Cat gut o cat good. Well, it's actually some French
folks who took us far far from cat gut uh
to more modern braces, so kind of In seventeen eight,
(17:34):
French dentist Pierre Fouchard published a book called The Surgeon Dentist,
which described what sounds terribly painful. It's some kind of
device called a band and braces. The brace technology really
didn't change all that much up until the nineteen fifties. Yeah,
and this brief history, by the way, is coming from
(17:55):
the fabulous folks at Mental Floss. And after the fifties
you have an accelerated pace of orthodontia technology. So by
the mid seventies orthodontists had figured out how to put
those brackets on the front of our teeth, and then
by the eighties they figured out this is how we
put them on the back of our teeth. And so
(18:18):
by the nineteen nineties, around a third of us kids
are getting braces. And now I feel like It's almost
a standard almost box you check where once you have
a kid you start taking to the dentist, it's like, well,
will he or she get braces or not? Yeah, I
never had braces. I had them on my bottom teeth.
(18:38):
They they wanted to wait to put them on my
top teeth because they wanted to break my jaw and
bring it forward because I have an overbite. But I
was like, I'm not gonna let you do that. You
don't know this yet, but I'm not going to let
you do that. So I never end up getting braces
on my top teeth, and they look great, beautiful teeth.
I feel like they're better from this side. I'm turning
my left side to Kristen because this side have a
(19:00):
crooked tooth, and today is the day I learned that
Caroline has a preferred tooth side I do so when
the paparazzi finally find me down here in Atlanta, you'll
know his side to turn. Take the picture from the left. Well,
the whole reason why we were even inspired to do
this episode on teeth is that when it comes to
braces in particular, it's far alikelier that little Janey's gonna
(19:24):
get braces compared to Little Johnny, or that she is
going to want braces, that she's gonna look in the
mirror and see her teeth and think those are not
up to snuff. Now, going back to earlier in the podcast,
when we were taking a trip around the world with
different forms of dental modification, there were some that were
exclusively targeted to women in those cultures, such as the
(19:49):
tooth blackening in Japan and tooth chiseling among certain groups.
But also now today braces tend to happen more often
among girls. It's really interesting looking at girls and also
their parents wanting girls to get braces. But there was
a study that looked at the factors that go into children,
(20:14):
young people, teens wanting UH dental therapy of of several
different kinds, and they found that the two main predictors
were psychological elements and female gender. So just simply being
a girl is a huge predictor of seeking things like
braces or other orthodontia or teeth whitening. Yeah, And that
(20:36):
study was linked to in an article by sociologist Philip
Cohen who noticed a stark gender gap in braces and
he wrote about it for sociological images, which was then
cross posted to a Pacific Standard magazine, and he found
looking at a bunch of studies, the girls are twice
as likely than boys to say that they don't like
(20:57):
their teeth and want braces, even said, just google image
braces and about of the photos that come up are all,
you know, stock images of girls with braces on. And
there was even uh, I don't know why it gave
me the heavy geeps, but if you go on Pinterest,
(21:19):
because I'm kind of gotten to a bit of an
Internet rabbit hole looking at uh, images of braces, you know,
kids embraces to see whether you know, what Cohen said
holds up, and it so does. If you go over
to Pinterest, there are so many pin boards just of
girls embraces. Why, I don't know. I think it's some
(21:39):
of its fashion, you know, for girls, you know, to
be proud of their braces, like beautiful with braces. But
it's definitely it's definitely a thing. Go on Pinterest and
you know, you don't have to take my word for it, um,
but this was something too that he found not just
in the US, but also abroad. Yeah, Samon in um,
(22:00):
England and Germany, that girls are more likely to get braces,
same with adult women. Um. Another Google search was, uh,
if you google mother daughter braces he was talking about,
you get pictures of mothers and daughters getting braces together.
But if you google father son braces, it brings you
(22:20):
to practices orthodonist offices run by fathers and sons. Yeah,
because adult braces have become more common in recent years,
and even among that you know clientele demographic, it tends
to skew female. And I went to the dentist a
couple of years ago and was so surprised because I
(22:43):
grew up had a great dentist and was never recommended
for braces. And I don't have a completely perfectly straight
mouth of teeth. But that is fine. They're they're like whatever.
And one of the first things she said was have
you ever considered braces? What? Yeah, she was like, if
you if you just wear these invisible line, no one
(23:04):
will even be able to go. No. No, that is
just such a sales pitch. They're just trying to make
money because dental costs are spiraling and they're not getting
all their money back from medicaid, and so they just
want to make their money through invisible line. Well, jokes
on you, Caroline, because she was right, you can't see
my invisible because they're in right now. No I don't.
I don't have them. Yeah, it did feel it. It
(23:27):
was a peculiar sales pitch to get. And I wonder
if a guy who walked in with my teeth and
my bite, which yes it is a perfect bite, oh good,
if she would have recommended that to him. I don't know.
Higher expectations for women, um so well, And that's what
Cohen thinks. The sociologists we talked about. He thinks that
(23:47):
it has a lot to do with these higher standards
and higher expectations for female beauty because more girls getting
bracest has absolutely nothing to do with more more girls
needed braces. They're also studies that he looked at comparing
whether kids were getting braces purely for aesthetic reasons or
(24:09):
because they did have some kind of dental alignment issue
that needed to be corrected, and overwhelmingly girls were likelier
to get them for purely aesthetic reasons. Right, But he
was also talking about how in reality, boys and girls
have equal need for braces among children who need them
to correct a problem or whatever. Straighten teeth, whatever, the
(24:30):
need is equal, but girls perception of their need is
way greater. Um he found that among girls who get braces,
their actual need is low. And like we said, with
adult braces, that's a trend that continues into adulthood, and
that includes cosmetic surgery. Women are much more likely to
get various types of cosmetic surgery into adulthood. Two. And
that goes back to expectations of how girls look. Yeah,
(24:53):
there was a survey from the American Academy of Cosmetic
Dentistry which found the eighty four percent of women reported
that they would pay money to improve the appearance of
their teeth compared to of men, and that was linked
to from a blog post over at the Beheld written
by Autumn Whitefield Madrono past Stuff Mom Never Told You
(25:15):
guessed who was wondering in this post whether the gender
gap is due to, yes, those higher beauty standards for
women and the way she put it so well that
average teeth on men are considered more acceptable than average
teeth on women. And the thing that got her thinking
about it at least in this post was Will Ferrell's teeth.
(25:36):
She was watching Anchorman and if you've watched anchor Man
or seen you know, anything with Will Ferrell, and it
you'll see that he does not he has pretty His
lower teeth in particular, are not all in the straight line,
let's put it that way. But you would never see.
I can't think of a single woman I've seen on
(25:57):
television who has that noticeably crooked teeth. And I think,
and this is just a hypothesis, but I think that
if you did, it would be because some messages being
played up that this woman was a quote unquote hillbilly,
or she was poor or something that if a woman's
teeth looked like that on television or in the movies,
it's to deliver a certain message about her, whereas that's
(26:18):
just that's just full Ferrel's teeth. Well, and that's the thing,
because the more we read about teeth, the more it
became apparent that even more than gender, these days, class
and social status are so closely associated with the status
of your teeth because you know, going way back in
time to you know, those Elizabethan women of means, they
(26:41):
would have those puffers to make sure that their cheeks
puffed out in the correct kind of way, and they
would have access to whatever sort of early dental care
was available, not so for the lower classes. And that's
something though, of poorer people not having access to dental
health care that remains today right. Um, And there was
(27:07):
a two thousand eight study in the journal Nature that
talked about the negative judgments that we lobb against people
who have teeth that are darker or more decayed. The
darker or more decayed they are, the more negative our
judgments are in terms of things like social competence, intellectual ability,
psychological adjustment, and relationship satisfaction. It's sort of a visible
(27:30):
sign of inadequate access to healthcare and to taking care
of oneself well. And I think there are more assumptions
about the taking care of oneself part that um that
really stands out because gender in this case did not
have a significant effect. If you have decaying teeth, missing teeth,
(27:51):
it has an equally negative impact on how people perceive you.
And I mean especially for missing teeth, if you lose
a tooth. Um, I've had a situation where I've shipped
a tooth before and you know, walked around for a
week with a little snaggle tooth and I knew it
was going to be fixed, but it drew so much
attention just because of one. Yeah, because you don't expect
(28:15):
to see this. You know, we have this idea that
you should have white, straight, perfect teeth because that signals
that you take care of yourself, that you have the
you know, the money to pay for dental visits, that
you might have had braces when you were a kid,
that you don't have some kind of drug habit, that
you don't smoke, et cetera. Right, But we don't automatically think, oh,
(28:35):
that girl has good health insurance and doesn't smoke or
do meth. We it's just sort of tied up in
our assumptions about, oh, like you said, taking care of
yourself exactly. And the perfect character on Internet TV, because
I don't know if you can call Netflix TV TV
who embodies this is Pensent Tucky on Orange is the
New Black who has those stereotypical, it out meth teeth,
(29:02):
and it's so much a part of her character as
well as that entire group on Orange is a New
Black that she's a part of that we all assume,
you know, have had meth problems in the past, and
so they have these rotted out teeth. But when she
returns with corrected teeth all of a sudden, she's too
big for britches and everybody thinks that she thinks she's
too good for them. Yeah, but with the with the
(29:24):
rotted out teeth, it's the signaling that she has little education,
she's not very smart, she had a drug habit. You know,
it's like or even during uh in Halloween times when
you know they're all of those false teeth at the
costume store, there's always a hillbilly teeth and they're you know,
poking out, they're missing, they're yellow, they're rotting right, And
(29:45):
speaking to the Telegraph, Malcolm Gladwell actually cited teeth as
the emerging social status signal between rich important. He equated
them and the issue of basically dental hygiene and your
teeth appear with obesity problems in terms of what they signal. Yeah,
he said, there's symptoms of the same set of inferences
(30:07):
that are being drawn. So from his logic, the same
way that obesity often is associated with having poor lifestyle habits,
we place the same set of negative social assumptions and
stigmas onto people who have less than perfect looking teeth.
And this is happening while the sort of Hollywood projected
(30:31):
standards for what your teeth should look like only you know,
continue to increase. Everyone has white, perfect teeth when you
flip through a magazine these days. But it's astonishing when
you look at the US, just the lack of oral healthcare,
because even with Obamacare and universal healthcare, there's still a
(30:53):
massive gap when it comes to dental coverage. There are
around one hundred thirty mill in Americans around forty of
the population with zero dental coverage. Yeah, and forty five
million Americans actually live nowhere near a dentist, And it
seems like in terms of health care and dental care,
(31:14):
dental is often almost like an afterthought because a lot
of people who do have health insurance still don't have
dental In two thousand and eight, for instance, a quarter
of Americans under sixty five had no dental coverage. And
having dental coverage tends to be correlated with income and education,
So people who have a college education, that's a big
(31:35):
predictor of whether you will actually have dental coverage, but
that definitely doesn't mean that everyone's going to have it.
And even with things like Medicaid and medicare, the dental
provisions are minimal at best. There is a statistic, I
think coming from the Pew Research Center which found that
in two thousand eleven, over half of all kids covered
(31:56):
by Medicaid received no dental care, which my have had
to do with where they are living, because there are
these massive geographical areas all around the US that have
no you know, dental practices, because setting up a thriving
dental practice can actually be challenging if you're not in
a large metropolitan area. But even for poor people over
(32:18):
twenty one who can get access to Medicaid, the only
dental care they can get applies to emergency dental treatments,
and even then it's paid for only on a state
by state basis. Yeah, so I mean in terms of price,
the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that average out of
pocket dental costs are eight hundred and seventy three dollars.
(32:40):
So basically, dental care for a lot of people, a
lot of people is becoming a luxury. And you have
the costs of dental care outpacing both the rate of
inflation and overall medical cost increases across the board. Well,
and think about it too, as you get older, you
probably need to take even better air of your teeth.
(33:01):
But when it comes to Medicare for the elderly, they
only get coverage for again, emergency dental procedures. It doesn't
even cover dentures um. So it's a little wonder then
that in two thousand nine, eight hundred thirty thousand and
fifty Americans went to the er for preventable dental problems
(33:21):
because I mean, what else are they going to do?
They can't there's nowhere else to go. Yeah. Yeah, And
and it's especially bad when you realize, and a lot
of people might not realize that poor dental health is
linked to a lot of other health problems. My father,
who has heart issues, totally preaches that people need to floss.
(33:45):
It's a huge thing for him because dental bacteria is
linked to things like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and pneumonia, preterm birth.
I mean, you wouldn't think it. You're like, oh, I
had some cheesy poofs and I'm just gonna fall asleep
and not worry about it. No brush those teeth. Russia's
jeezy poofs out. But if you are living in a
paycheck to paycheck situation or even less than clearly. You
(34:10):
know what was that eight seventy three dollars average out
of cost dental care. If you don't have insurance, that's
going to be the last thing that you're going to
pay for most likely, unless you it is to the
point to where you are in such extreme pain that
you probably will have to go to the emergency room.
So it's something that we don't think about very often
(34:31):
at all when we just see these celebrities walking down
the red carpet with these perfectly imperfect veneers that they've
gotten for thousands of dollars, that this is actually a
huge issue and there's so much social class tied up
with that. So this modern day quest for a quote
(34:52):
unquote perfect smile is about so much more than looking good.
I mean, this is about basic healthcare that people are
missing out on. Okay, So now that we have thrown
a bunch of these stats that you I'm I'm interested
in hearing from listeners who maybe have felt discrimination based
on their appearance there, especially their teeth appearance. I have
(35:15):
a friend who got a tooth knocked out in a
freak accident, and he didn't worry about getting it replaced
for a while because of money issues. But then it
came time to do job interviews and it's like it's
not going to happen. Not in the back of his
mouth either, it's one of his front teeth, and he's like,
I've got to go show out some big bucks now
to get a to get a fake tooth so that
(35:35):
I can get a job. Yeah. Absolutely so. Um, if
you've experienced these kinds of things, or if you are
perhaps a social worker who works with lower income communities
on to target these kinds of dental issues, we particularly
want to hear from you because there is so much
(35:55):
more to our teeth than whether or not we just
have perfect straight white paparazzi ready choppers. Remember shoot me
from the left, yes. And and by the way, if
you also are a paparazzo, shoot Caroline from the left
with a camera. Yes, with a camera. So send us
(36:15):
all of your thoughts on teeth. Mom Stuff at how
stuffworks dot com is our email address, and you can
also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast or messages on Facebook.
And we have a couple of messages to share with
you right now about insomnia. Well, I have a letter
here from Cindy. She says, I was so glad to
(36:37):
hear your podcast on Lady Insomnia, more specifically the idea
that the sleep wake sleep cycle maybe a natural occurrence
and one our ancestors regularly experienced. In the past, I
quote unquote struggled with insomnia, becoming frustrated and anxious when
I would go through periods of awakening for several hours
in the night, for many nights in a row. My
(36:58):
anxiety would put me into that anxiety loop you spoke of. Recently,
I heard about Ben Franklin's nighttime adventures. I heard that
Mark Twain also experienced great creativity in the night. I
realized that I, too, maybe just one of the great snicker.
I decided to accept night weights as normal and see
what that attitude shift might do for me. It has
been great, although there have still been a few times
(37:20):
when my wakefulness seemed more exhausting and less enlightening. For
the most part, I now accept my night weights as
a time of peaceful reflection or, let's be honest, facebook
alone time. I generally give myself one or two hours
in the night of wakefulness before I shut the iPad
and attempt to sleep again. Usually that's all it takes
sometimes I wake again and go through my wake cycle
(37:41):
once more, but usually not. I awake with less frustrated
anxiety and feel more rested than when I got the
same amount or lack of sleep but was angry about it.
I completely agree that some forms of insomnia are much
worse than mine and much more crazy making. However, much
like accepting the pain of childbirth as normal and therefore
fearing it less even though it still hurts my accepting
(38:03):
this sleep wake sleep cycle as natural does not change it,
but it changes my attitude toward it and therefore makes
it less grading usually on my soul. So thank you
for sharing your experience. Then, I also thought about trying
out that sleep wake sleep thing, but I end up
just lying in bed sad well. I also have a
letter here from c J about insomnia, and though the
(38:23):
whole thing is too long to share, I did want
to share some of it. C J writes, after a
certain point, I kind of gave up on trying to
conform myself to what is considered normal and quit inflicting
the belief of others that it was somehow a huge
failing of mine that I couldn't fall asleep by eleven PM,
or fall asleep within fifteen minutes of going to bed.
(38:44):
Society has very little sympathy for you if you don't
wake up early on a permanent basis. Schools and most
jobs start in early morning hours. In our society is
permeated with the thought that the early bird gets the worm.
I learned long ago not to mention my sleep problems
because the most common or sponse I get is along
the lines of you must really like to stay out
late partying, which couldn't be further from the truth. Recently,
(39:08):
I saw new advice for taking melatonin using a formula
based on when you wanted to get up. This new
advice times by Meltonian taking closer to eight pm, rather
than the previous advice for my doctors, which was to
take it right before I went to bed. This method
of taking the melitone in earlier, along with the other
things I do, like trying to wake up at similar
times every day, avoiding blue light in the evening, avoiding
(39:28):
eating late, getting exercise, and not doing other things in
my bedroom, etcetera, has allowed for my best time so
far in terms of sleep. Over the last twenty years
or so, I've usually been able to follow sleep around
one am, and I can also get to my current
job around nine am, so I've been able to get
around seven hours of sleep on a somewhat regular basis,
which is pretty darn good for me. With taking the
(39:49):
melitone in early for the first time in my life,
I actually feel a little more normal because I usually
feel sleepy before I go to bed, which I never
did before. Sleepy, physically tired or unfortunately two different things.
And I don't feel like the walking dead most of
the time. So I would encourage people to try and
get treatment, maybe because it can help, but also don't
(40:10):
beat yourself up if it doesn't work as well as
you'd hope. Maybe try working your life more around the
insomnia rather than the other way around. And for those
of you without insomnia, I'd be grateful and please have
a little more sympathy for us night owls. So thanks
c J and thanks to everybody who's written into us.
Mom stuff at how Stuff Works dot Com is our
email address and for links to all of our social
(40:31):
media's as well as all of our blog posts, videos,
and podcasts. There's one place to go, and it's Stuff
Mom Never Told You dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, doesn't how stuff works. Dot
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