“I love your teeth. You're from England, right?” Charlotte Le Bon asks his co-star Aimee Lou Wood in an early episode of “The White Lotus” this season.
Wood's smile is broad, beautiful, and novel these days, and appears to have been caught up in submission by orthodontics and cosmetic modifications, among her casters, and in a wider sea of actors with straight, evenly spaced teeth.
The lines that Le Bon improvised were found to be foresightful.
Online, viewers of the show are beginning to praise Wood, who is actually from England for choosing to keep a natural smile. Praise prompted the question: whose teeth became so perfect?
Emma Dixon, 30, said she felt “consolation” when she saw Wood Onscreen.
Like Wood, Dixon has a gap between her front teeth. As an actor and medical aesthetician, Dixon, who lives in Chicago, said he is too familiar with the pressure to have the perfect pearl white. She described the ubiquitous veneer style in Hollywood as a “copy and paste smile,” and said she was sad when a celebrity who resembles her teeth seemed to fix her own.
“At the beginning of the “real housewife” franchise and “Catch up with the Kardashian,” there was this appeal to the most bleached teeth you could have,” said Sarah Hahn, a prosthetic in Fremont, California. “It became more and more common. So many people were doing it.”
“We can name one million celebrities,” she added.
Over time, as appearances became more widely popular among celebrities, everyday people began to look more harshly at their smiles.
Joyce Kern, a cosmetic dentist from Costa Mesa, California, said that since 2020, the “zoom effect” has led to a growing interest among veneer patients.
“People were constantly looking at themselves and starting to knit pick themselves,” she said. Wanting teeth that look perfect is very American, but not just that, she said, an aesthetic spirit.
“People are hoping that at this point all the celebrities will get their teeth done,” Dr. Khan continued. “It started with celebrities, then I went to influencers, and influencers are a bit closer to normal everyday people.
Still, not everyone finds a glittering row of straight bleach teeth. As people trained their eyes and found celebrity veneers, a small repulsion began to brew. Some call too perfect teeth “chiclets” and admire the old days of television and filmmaking when actors didn't look that similar to each other. Even those who want veneers may want something that looks too perfect.
“American television is now becoming very homogenous visually,” said Sue Anne Jarrett, 33, who lives in Brooklyn. “I feel that a lot of people look very similar.”
Shedica Williams, a Brooklyn resident, said Wood's teeth made her feel regretful about getting her braces and changing her smile.
“I've seen a lot of videos of creator Tiktok that I've done before and after, and it makes me sad because I always think the previous drawing looks much better,” Williams said.
In her video, which she calls “veneer check,” Dr. Hahn explains what is going on in the mouth of a celebrity technically, often using images that show the change, with images that spanned years.
The former professor, she said, is trying to make her videos positive and educational. She said she wanted to help people understand the dental work that their favorite stars might have had, rather than criticizing the quality of the work themselves.
Dr. Kahng, who also created Tiktok's celebrity dental content, said that although she took a similar approach to some of her videos, she occasionally spurred criticism.
“People are linking teeth to the socioeconomic level,” Dr. Khan said. Last year, for example, Jojo Siwa granted $50,000 for a new set of teeth.
Dr. Kahng then stopped making videos analyzing celebrities' teeth.
“If you pick up someone's teeth and it's not really bothering you and start a conversation about them, when it really wasn't an issue, people start to hate themselves,” she said.
In a recent interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Wood addressed the sudden appeal of teeth.
“These people live in Hollywood,” she said of her castmates. “I live in my small flat in southeast London. I'm so British, so I didn't know how to be around a lot of people who are so frontal and confident.
The way “White Lotus” fans are talking about her teeth added, “I don't have veneer or Botox – it feels a bit rebellious.”
Dixon, a medical aesthetician from Chicago, said she is also a bit offensive at the way that some people praise Wood's smile.
“She has something a little unique, but in every other way she meets the exact beauty standards that Hollywood has loved forever,” Dixon said. And perhaps the way to make normal teeth more, well, again, isn't to comment on them, she suggested.
“Even yourself, when people are like, 'Oh, my god, they love your gap!',” Dixon said. “It's always like, 'Thank you – why are we talking about this?'
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