America’s gotten to me, I finally got braces

Americans are mad about teeth, it almost seems everyone has a sparkly white grin on the streets of New York, so I finally took my wonky British teeth to the dentist and got braces, writes Holly Baxter

The joke’s on me... though maybe not for much longer (Getty)

If there’s one thing that defines America more than stars and stripes, apple pie and ice cream, cowboy boots and blue jeans, it’s teeth. Bright white, ruler-straight teeth are an American export, announcing themselves on every Hollywood screen and midwest gameshow. With expensive orthodontia a given in pretty much every American child’s teenage years, and few medical regulations on the bleaching strips that fill out the aisles in every New York pharmacy, you can’t help but feel a little inconspicuous walking the streets of Brooklyn with an NHS smile. After your 700th megawatt grin, you start running your tongue over your incisors and covering your mouth with a napkin when you laugh, lest you offend passersby with a tea-stained line of partially crumbling gravestones.

“Americans are mad about their teeth!” I hear you say. “Pay them no mind!” Well, it’s easy to say that when you’re firmly ensconced in Yorkshire or Reading or Edinburgh; less so when you live in a city where everyone’s mouth looks like it’s got a UV light permanently trained on it.

All of this is a long-winded way to say: I got braces. I’ve always been a bit insecure about my wonky front teeth but also a bit too shy to bring it up. Robust British dentists would pat me on the shoulder in London offices and say, “Well, they’re functional!” when I went in for a cleaning or a cavity. “They’re not… beautiful,though,” I’d respond, laughing it off in that I-don’t-really-care-but-I-do-but-ignore-me way we all get taught in compulsory lessons in UK schools, age four. “They’re teeth!” the dentists would respond, as if I’d just said my giraffe wasn’t blue enough or my armchair couldn’t fly. “Off you go, and I’ll see you in six months’ time.”

What they don’t tell you until they’ve got the metal firmly welded to your enamel is that adult braces hurt twice as much as braces when you’re a kid

And that would have been all, if I haven’t also begun a very attractive habit of grinding my teeth in my early thirties. Waking up with my jaw clenched in a vice-like grip on my molars every morning of the pandemic led to a couple of “deep fillings” – the polite version of “you just swerved a root canal, but good luck pulling it off again” – and an American dentist enquiring with concern about the extreme off-centre bite of my teeth. “The physics of your mouth are all off,” a stunningly beautiful woman with a mask told me as she injected me with local anaesthetic. “Has a professional ever told you that before?” I thought about the idea of a British dentist stopping to converse about the physics of my mouth and shook my head.

A couple (well, five) orthodontic appointments later and I was on the braces treadmill. “The bite will take a year to fix,” a charismatic orthodontist with a storyboard and a digital model of my mouth told me. “But the wonky teeth will be gone in three months.”

“Three months, huh?” I said, cognisant of my twice-rescheduled wedding, once meant to go ahead in September 2020 and then May 2021, now October of this year. I envisioned myself flashing an American smile as I walked down the long-awaited aisle, and it felt like a nice consolation prize. “Stick them on, doc.”

What they don’t tell you until they’ve got the metal firmly welded to your enamel is that adult braces hurt twice as much as braces when you’re a kid, because adult teeth tend to be a little more set in their ways. Over the past seven days, I have been through multiple days of agony – and multiple pints of ice cream. I’m pleased to say, however, that they seem to have settled down now, and the only lasting effect is a tendency to be ID’d in every bar I walk into. Stay tuned for my American smile, coming to every photo I previously did a tight-lipped smile in by 2022.