The Dental Beauty Ideal Is Becoming Increasingly And Freakishly Too Perfect
The Dental Beauty Ideal Is Becoming Increasingly And Freakishly Too Perfect

Imagine this: laying in bed in those few moments just after you wake up in the morning, and feeling completely and utterly content with how you are right now in life. Imagine. Nothing to berate yourself for, no-one to compare yourself with, no triggering of that endless gotta-do-gotta-be list with wicked deadlines whirring repeatedly in your head.
Imagine (if you dare) the incredibly peaceful relief, in just not caring so much.
Aesthetic competitiveness has become a common preoccupation that’s neither natural, useful, or respectful to who we are. It dismisses the body of bodies from whence we came; it creates a sense of lack when there isn’t one.
It’s derisively incisive. A divisive device that separates us from the presence of our present self. Therefore it has us living from the precarious perspective of future, or past.
Constantly straddling time in our mind with how good we’re going to look, or how beautiful we once were, serves us little. It’s mentally wearying, with a side-order of ghastly guilt for the lives of immense luck and privilege likely experienced by the majority reading this in countries with the wealth and resource status available to a mere 14% of the global population.
Were any of us to be hit by a bus (scrolling through beautiful-people somethings; it happens) it’ll be a case of what you see is what you get – demise doesn’t do do-overs.
If too, it’s true that you get to view yourself from above as you leave this mortal coil, one would hope that if there were any thoughts to be had, they’d be about how wonderful and wonder-filled the whole sensate thing was – not how it would’ve been, had you handed over more money to any one of the billion-dollar vanity industries.
Uber-controversial rhetoric and Rolls Royce devotee, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (1931-1990), later known as Osho, like some other recognisable people before him, has gained popularity since his death. As the founder of the Rajneesh movement, popular in the 1980s for its philosophies and teachings on sex, and contentious for many reasons that only include his reported $US400 billion worth, his books have been translated into more than 60 languages.
It is said that he possessed critical insight in the workings of the human mind. Coupled with his highly persuasive skills, he used faulty and invalid logic to undermine and disarm people of their beliefs in order to convince them of his. It’s a strategy of circular reasoning, hasty generalising and straw man arguments that are so universally deployed, it’s like listing all the possible places the colour purple might be. From personal disagreements to political debate, there’s little point pinning him for his method when essentially he was doing nothing less than any person, corporation or entity does in garnering attachment, support, power or money.
Putting aside whether he earned his place on the side of the tricky or the trustworthy, and whether he offered a philosophical feast or an all-you-can-eat word salad buffet, among his many quotes is this: “Accept yourself as you are. And that is the most difficult thing in the world, because it goes against your training, education, your culture. From the very beginning you have been told how you should be; nobody has ever told you that you are good as you are.”
Interesting.
Interesting because given Osho’s communication strategies, wealth accumulation and by applying just a modicum of critical evaluation, what he said cannot be entirely true, yet many of us are willing to unreservedly believe that it is.
We have created a world of high value in other people’s looks and the ways they physically present themselves, with our own generally much, much lower on our fantasy scale. We make these erroneous comparisons between ourselves and others – upwardly, downwardly and inaccurately – and ultimately, it achieves little other than a potentially damaged sense of self.
Social media of course, is the relentless pumping, plumping highway of the unbelievably unobtainable. Paved with millions and millions of close-ups, videos and selfies of faces nothing like yours, often they’re not like the person claiming it as theirs either.
The first time patients began telling their dentists they wanted their teeth fixed because they didn’t like the way they looked in selfies was 2015. Prior to that, because the results exceed that of traditional orthodontia, dental veneers were the answer to serious tooth size or shape issues. Perfecting already perfectly good teeth and dentally quirky smiles, had for the most part been confined to those of affluence, and the beauty-blessed with a public career. It was a dental beauty process that hadn’t been particularly favoured among stars and celebrities until the late 1990s.
The cost of veneers hits thousands apiece; and now, a decade later it seems ‘normal’ to have to find a way to finance often quite unnecessary changes, in order to meet the self-imposed pressure of beauty standards that belong to the far wealthier and usually famous, or are completely fake altogether.
So crazy is this craze for cosmetic dentistry, it’s a cracking $US34 billion industry.
And it reaches far beyond what began as mostly young, mostly female, and mostly ‘influencer’ – now it’s anyone who wants to look better online. Age or reason is no barrier.
Pragmatically, one would think that the very best way to look better online is to not post a host of selfies and look at them all the time. Were someone to be seen walking around staring into a 3-panel mirror all day, either Ovid and Echo ought to be summoned, or a therapist.
Which is sadly too common for too many.
The irony in this deal demanding the dental ideal, is the permanent damage it causes your teeth – either as a result of the arduous and expensive voyage to veneers; or from the second choice to that – whitening – and the resultant overbleaching. Both are extremely damaging to tooth enamel, which of course you only ever have one shot at.
Not like a selfie; which created this whole issue in the first place.
Undoubtedly veneers have a legitimate place in dentistry. For teeth that have suffered impairment through accident or genetics, or for example, to minimise naturally large spaces between teeth as a preventative measure against decay.
However, the growing demand for veneers is driven by aesthetics alone. Down that crazy highway. And no transit lanes on the way, either. Ain’t no-one talkin’ sense to anyone.
And while we’re flattening the irony here, no amount of money can produce viable, healthy, natural, tooth structure. The nerve damage that can come from the necessity to file the tooth surface can ultimately render it dead: thus requiring the dreaded root canal, a complex treatment with its own set of issues.
Any dental procedure carries risks, and completing cosmetic dentistry in a country that offers it for less cost is often balanced out by an increased possibility of a really unsatisfactory outcome, in either the short or long term.
The fact is veneers are forever.
Assuming there are no dramas in between, they need to be redone about every 10 or 15 years; and each time the dentist has to shave a bit more tooth. If you start in your 30s, that’s at least four replacements over a lifetime – with a finite quantity of organic material to work with. At some point, the tooth is simply not going to be strong enough to hold what your dentist is wanting to put on it.
It’ll snap.
So snap out of it. And stop caring so much. There’s a better life for you to be living. It’s messy, unpredictable, stunning, challenging, ugly, spontaneously hilarious and yours alone. It just needs you to face it.
With your own face. A huge part of which are your own perfectly imperfect teeth.
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