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If you look at pictures of my mother from the 1970s, when she was roughly my age and her buckteeth overshadowed the rest of her child-size ones, we have the same jankity smile. They give me comfort, these images: She looks chic in the perfect pair of bell-bottoms, with her thick bangs hanging Ramones-heavy. Somehow, the tilted imperfection of her teeth only adds to the appeal—a balm to me, a woman for whom picket-fence incisors have never been a calling card, unless calling card means “thing you are mercilessly teased for.”
My baby teeth were straight enough. But around age six things got weird. Rather than have big-kid teeth sprout up and usurp their predecessors, I simply grew an extra row, like some wayward shark. A dentist was forced to extract the baby teeth and insert a permanent retainer that would bring my adult teeth center stage. Meanwhile, my lower jaw maintained the look of a haunted graveyard, and on top, two giant teeth up front were flanked by miniaturized canines. The look did not cement my already shaky social status. But there were always those pictures of my mother to buoy my confidence and remind me that a sixth-grader’s buckteeth could become the glamorous central focus of a fascinating face. I still came back to them as a tween, even after our goofy mouths no longer aligned, after my mother fell prey to the tug of porcelain veneers sometime in the early nineties. My grandfather, a small-time dentist with one chair in the basement of his house, insisted that he could remake her smile and therefore her life. Mine remained cartoonish and mismatched, while hers became a line of perfect Chiclets, designed to create an almost–Stepford Wife impression. Thank God she kept her nose.
When I first entered the public eye, I did so with my own teeth, which I soon realized was not something typically embarked upon by the freshly famous. This was also before I had learned another cardinal rule of celebrity: Thou shalt not search thyself on Twitter. When I did, I found an alarming number of comments about my teeth. Rather than paraphrase, I’ll share a few here (I was able, via a hesitant recent search, to find at least 30 pages of such comments):
Not to pile on but Lena Dunham has gerbil teeth.
Lena Dunham . . . got them British wooden fence post teeth.
When are we going to address the alarmingly large size of Lena Dunham’s front teeth?
The thing that bothers me most about Lena Dunham is the fact that she’s rich & her teeth are still brown.
Is Lena Dunham against whitening her teeth?
The last tweet, I hate to say it, gets to the real heart of the matter: Am I against whitening my teeth? In my work, I have been vocal about my distaste for being airbrushed, and I try to promote a sense of deep and personal body acceptance in everything I do. But I also have tattooed-on eyebrows thanks to another journey of the soul for this magazine, and, until recently, hair extensions as silky-smooth as George Clooney’s smile. As with so many women, my relationship to the trappings of beauty changes every day. And from the first time I read a tooth criticism online, I developed the habits of the suddenly self-conscious, pursing my lips at inopportune times like I’d just sucked down half a lemon.
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To fully understand my internal tooth battle, one also has to understand my father’s stance on teeth: After years of coffee drinking and cigarette smoking (now replaced with tea and sci-fi novels), he has always insisted that his healthy, strong, cavity-free—and, yes, yellowed—teeth are worth considerably more than a first impression at a cocktail party. “Your teeth are fine,” he tells me. “They’re doing the job. Leave them alone.” But not everyone feels this way. A former publicist once asked my creative partner to broach the subject of tooth-whitening with me. “It just feels like it’s time,” she said. So I began a research project, dreaming of a world in which my front teeth would be so white that their gargantuan size might even be a plus.
In an effort to gather as much information on the subject as possible, I quizzed the heck out of Mojgan Fajiram, D.D.S., a Manhattan dentist specializing in brightening even the grayest of grins. I have heard tooth-whitening horror stories from a few friends who felt they emerged from the procedure unnaturally, distractingly whitened with aching enamel, I tell Fajiram. Those kind of results are something an experienced cosmetic dentist should be able to avoid, she replies. Fajiram credits Instagram culture with giving patients an unnatural sense of what a smile should look like. Newly accessible tooth-perfecting services, such as Smile Direct Club’s mail-order invisible aligners—straighten your teeth for only $250 down and $80 a month!—are also adding to the illusion. “I have millennials who walk in here wanting a white Hollywood smile that they don’t really need.”
But for the right patient, she says, bleaching—and even veneers (porcelain fronts that are placed over the original teeth, in some cases shaved down to nubs)—can be a game changer. “Your smile is the chandelier of your face,” says Fajiram, a presumed metaphor about how “good” teeth can light up a room. “I truly believe that fixing your teeth—be it with braces or invisible aligners to correct; bleaching; or, if you really do need them, veneers—can give so many people confidence. They feel better.” She then launches into a few harrowing tales about patients who have actually taught themselves not to smile, for fear of offending the world with their aggressively imperfect mouths. “Sometimes I joke with them [after a procedure] and tell them, ‘Now you have to go to smile rehab!’ ”
Smile rehab! That’s where I want—nay, need—to be, I convince myself. After some thorough vetting, I visit Michael Apa, D.D.S., a “dental rock star,” if the internet is to be believed, with practices in both New York and Dubai, as well as a line of at-home whitening products chic enough for Net-a-Porter. Apa specializes in bringing that Hollywood smile to people across industries, with whitening, veneers, and a variety of cosmetic procedures that will erase all stains and discoloration (and the memory of them). I set an appointment for an upcoming Tuesday and brag to anyone who will listen about what is in store: “Soon you’ll barely recognize me. I will be the Sandra Bullock of this office!”
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“You know, that freaking hurts,” a friend who has whitened before informs me. Most in-office teeth bleaching, which now involves a targeted LED light aimed at the patient’s mouth, to be followed up with at-home trays and professional-grade whitening gel, is not to be confused with veneers (the Cadillac of cosmetic dentistry and the reason most celebrities look like you filled their mouth with iPhone power cubes). “I can take a lot of pain for beauty, and I was in hell.”
In a state of hot fear, I cancel my appointment. “I’ve lived this long looking like a habitual meth user,” I think. “This can wait another week.” But when that next week comes, I am still torturing myself, half convinced the procedure will ruin my life by creating a dull oral ache, and half convinced it will expand it beyond my wildest dreams. I call Apa to get another opinion on the pain factor. “Everyone is unique in their enamel or tooth makeup. I would say the worst reaction is similar to that of a sunburn, maybe in 20 percent of patients,” he explains of the lightening procedure, which can be tailored to individual needs (desired level of whiteness directly dictates the number of 90-minute sessions that are required in Apa’s Madison Avenue office). “It’s nothing that Advil won’t take care of,” he continues of the potential discomfort, which typically lasts for just 24 hours. To someone who has endured eleven abdominal surgeries, 24 hours of possible pain seems plenty doable.
The next week comes, and so does my appointment. But as I look in the mirror, I feel a different kind of anxiety. What if the whiteness of my new teeth doesn’t match the rest of my face— freckled, uneven, and often makeup-free? Will it be the equivalent of a heavy-handed spray tan on someone who refuses to leave their Maui hotel room? And, perhaps most pressing, how good will this really make me feel?
I harass poor Apa again, whom I imagine busily jetting to Dubai and back, groaning when he sees my name pop up in his in-box. “There is nothing to be scared of,” he says of the bleaching process, which can be subtle and which he describes as “the kiddie pool” of cosmetic dentistry.
So I will still recognize myself? I ask.
He assures me that I will. “When you see someone with really white teeth, those are porcelain veneers, not bleaching. It’s a common mistake in perception.”
Then our conversation takes a socialist turn.
“Do you think people whiten their teeth to look richer?” I ask, imagining that the prevalence of perfect, celebrity mouths—the mouth I’m supposed to have—must in some way be influencing the trend toward commodifying tooth homogeneity for those who will never have to smile on Good Morning America.
“I think it has to do with looking healthier,” he replies diplomatically before conceding that someone who appears well-groomed looks like they have the means to take care of themselves. “It’s the same thing with white teeth.”
When my third appointment date arrives, I get up, put on my best blazer from The Row, and prepare for liftoff. But as I proceed down my Brooklyn street, something almost mystical comes over me. I watch the people scurrying by, in various states of business casual, athleisure, and old lady–muumuu chic, like a walking episode of Barney & Friends. In that moment, I feel deeply that it is our differences that unite us; that it is the strange details of our faces that make us so totally human. If the mouth is a third window to the soul, then I want mine to look like someone has punched their way through it in a mad rage.
Realizing that I am about to make a decision based solely on unsolicited outside input, I call Apa’s office once more, apologize for wasting their time, and let them know my teeth will be growing more dingy by the day, on my terms. I will continue on: beaver-toothed, yellowed, enraging the internet one post at a time with a smile only a mother could love.
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