In Japan, Women Pay to Make Straight Teeth Crooked
A Little Imperfection for That Smile?
While Americans pour billions into straightening, whitening and repairing their teeth, Japan has been going in the opposite direction: in Tokyo, straight teeth are no longer the ideal.
A new fashion has women paying to have their perfectly straight teeth purposefully disarranged. The look is called yaeba (八重歯) — literally "double tooth" — a crowded, crooked-toothed smile with accentuated, fang-like canines.
What Americans would deride as a "snaggletooth," Japanese men reportedly find youthful and endearingly attractive. The slight imperfection is seen as making a pretty face more approachable — a deliberate charm point in a culture that finds beauty in things that are not perfect.
Dental clinics in Tokyo oblige with a cosmetic procedure called tsuke-yaeba ("attached yaeba"): artificial mini-fangs glued onto the patient's real canines, with no shaving of the natural tooth. The look is removable, and clinics were reported to charge anywhere from around $120 per snaggle to roughly $390 for the full treatment, depending on the clinic.
The trend, first reported by the New York Times in October 2011, was amplified by pop stars and television, and grew so popular that a Tokyo dental clinic even formed a girl band named after the procedure.
Beauty, it turns out, is not only in the eye of the beholder — it is in the zip code.
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