When I asked him if he thought gaps were trendy, or “cute” right now, he was suspect. “She asked me to do this procedure within the past two years and I had to ask her a half a dozen times if I was understanding what she was asking me to do but she absolutely loved it.” Lockhart only agreed to the procedure because of crowning in the patient’s teeth. “The patient was a hairdresser who is familiar with trends and she wanted to create the diastema because she said it was ‘cute,’” explained Lockhart. The gap is "trendy" to the point that Lockhart even had one patient (only one in the past 30 years) who asked him to create a diastema where it didn't exist. A feature I never fixed because it made me feel unique was shared with a number of people who must have felt the same way. Somehow, the information that lots of other people also voluntarily kept their gap comforted me. In French, the phrase for gap teeth, dents du bonheur, literally translates to “lucky teeth.” A 2010 Wall Street Journalpiece about fashion’s obsession with gaps points out that medieval laws of physiognomy once saw gaps as a visual signal that a woman was lustful and licentious, according to Colin Jones, a professor at the Queen Mary University of London and author of The Smile Revolution: In Eighteenth-Century Paris. “Because they believe having a gap between the teeth is really sign of masculinity, or sexual masculinity, something like that.” It’s not just in the Caribbean either: In other cultures, gaps have been tied to wealth and sexuality. “In some cultures like Caribbean Islanders, for example, they want the gap opened, “ says Drut. In fact, gapped teeth are treasured in places outside of the U.S. That same over-saturation of photos can be viewed the opposite way: In a sea of so many people who look the same, gapped teeth is a way to stand out as an individual. They exist in the spaces of power and beauty where I’m accustomed to seeing perfectly straight ones: Jessica Hart on the runway, Dani Evans winning America’s Next Top Model, Stacey Abrams’ isolated ivories beaming on the cover of New York magazine.įunnily enough, social media also seems to be the reason for the diastema’s popularity. Simultaneously, people with gapped teeth (medically called a diastema) are seemingly as "trendy" as faux freckles were a summer ago. Somehow both of the following things are true: There is an increase in women closing their “smile gaps,” according to New York orthodontists. I’m learning that my love-hate relationship is shared by an increasingly visible gap-toothed population. Now, I’m of two minds about my gap teeth: somedays, the words of my bullies echo between the space, but most of the time I love it and see it as something unique that sets me apart. In high school, the gap between my two front teeth was the thing I most hated, so, naturally, it was the quality the gang of bullies took the most pleasure in calling out. They’re not mature enough to hold their most evil thoughts in, but talented enough to pinpoint the very thing you are self-conscious about-then weaponize it. High school kids are the worst kind of mean.
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