“I love your teeth. You’re from England, right?” Charlotte Le Bon asks her costar Aimee Lou Wood in an early episode of this season of The White Lotus on Sky Atlantic.
Wood’s smile is broad, beautiful and something of a novelty these days – both among her castmates and in a broader sea of actors with straight, evenly spaced teeth having been apparently willed into submission by orthodontics or cosmetic modification.
The line, which Le Bon improvised, turned out to be prescient.
Online, viewers of the show have also begun praising Wood, who is indeed from England, for choosing to keep her natural smile. The praise has also prompted a question: When did everyone’s teeth get so perfect?
Emma Dickson (30) said seeing Wood onscreen felt “comforting”.
Like Wood, Dickson has a gap between her front teeth. As an actor and medical aesthetician, Dickson, who lives in Chicago, said she was all too familiar with the pressure to have flawless pearly whites. She described the style of veneers that are so ubiquitous in Hollywood as the “copy-and-paste smile”, and said she was saddened when celebrities with teeth resembling her own appeared to correct them.
“I feel like in the beginning of the Real Housewives franchise and Keeping Up With the Kardashians, there was this fascination with the most bleached tooth you could have,” said Sarah Hahn, a prosthodontist in Fremont, California, who has carved out a niche for herself on TikTok analysing celebrity smiles.
“It became more and more prevalent. So many people were doing it. You could name off a million celebrities, and they were all getting veneers.”
It started with celebrities. Then it went on to influencers. And influencers are a tad bit closer to just regular everyday people. Once influencers started getting them, everyone started getting them
— Joyce Kahng, cosmetic dentist
Over time, as the look became more widespread among celebrities, everyday people began to take a harsher look at their own smiles.
Joyce Kahng, a cosmetic dentist from Costa Mesa, California, said she saw an uptick in patient interest in veneers after 2020 thanks to the ‘Zoom effect’.
“People were constantly looking at themselves and starting to nitpick themselves,” she said. Wanting perfect-looking teeth is a very American – though not exclusively – aesthetic ethos, she said.
“People expect celebrities to all get their teeth done at this point,” Kahng said. “It started with celebrities. Then it went on to influencers. And influencers are a tad bit closer to just regular everyday people. Once influencers started getting them, everyone started getting them.”
Still, not everyone finds a gleaming row of straight, bleach-white teeth aspirational. As people train their eyes to spot celebrity veneers, a small backlash has started to brew. Some derisively call the too-perfect teeth ‘Chiclets’ and yearn for an older era of television and filmmaking when actors didn’t so closely resemble one another. Even those who want veneers may ask for ones that don’t look too perfect.
“American TV now is becoming visually very homogenous,” said Sue-Ann Jarrett, who is 33 and lives in New York City’s Brooklyn borough. “I feel like a lot of people are just looking very similar.”
Shedika Williams, who also lives in Brooklyn, said Wood’s teeth made her feel a twinge of regret about getting braces and altering her own smile.
“I watch a lot of TikTok videos of creators doing before-and-afters, and it makes me sad because I always think the before picture looks way better,” said Williams (27). “It just made them look more unique, and their teeth fit them.”
In her videos, which she calls “veneer checks”, Hahn explains what is going on in celebrities’ mouths in technical terms, often using images spanning multiple years to show changes.
A former professor, she tries to keep her videos positive and educational, she said, hoping to help people understand what dental work their favourite stars might have had rather than to criticise the quality of the work itself.
In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Wood, who also starred in Netflix’s Toxic Town and Sex Education, addressed the sudden fascination with her teeth.
“These people live in Hollywood,” she said of her castmates. “I live in my little flat in southeast London, and I’m so British in my sensibility that I wasn’t sure how to handle being around so many people who are so front-footed and confident. All I ever do is take the piss out of myself.”
The way White Lotus fans are talking about her teeth, she added, “that I don’t have veneers or Botox – it feels a bit rebellious”.
Dickson said she was also slightly uncomfortable with the way some people have lavished praise on Wood’s smile.
“There is something slightly unique about her, but in every other way she fits the exact beauty standard that Hollywood has loved forever,” Dickson said. And perhaps a way to make normal teeth more, well, normal again would be not to comment on them, she suggested.
“Even for myself, when people are like, ‘Oh my God, they love your gap!‘” Dickson said. “It’s always just kind of like, ‘Thank you – why are we talking about this?‘”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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