MARK GILBERT: Society now expects us all to have brilliant white teeth

The Postie Notes by Mark Gilbert

Bloody hell, I think I know where all the NHS dentists have disappeared to in the years since the first Covid lockdowns!

I’ve been trying to get an NHS appointment for four years now and have been given several reasons why I can’t have one, but it’s been suggested that I could go private instead.

Luckily, I work for a company that can offer a lot of benefits to its staff and I now pay into a dental plan.

The last time I had an NHS appointment the dentist suggested that I might be interested in having veneers or teeth whitening, so I asked if it was on the NHS and he replied: “No, but I can refer you to a contact.”

I declined his kind offer on the grounds that I’m quite old now and wouldn’t get value for money if I popped my clogs any time soon, but I’d look good laid out with gleaming gnashers.

Trends generally come and go, in my time I’ve seen teddy boys and mods & rockers. I was a skinhead and then there was Punk, New Romantic, the Boy George era, and so on, but the era of “White Teeth” crept up on us quietly, until BANG! Everyone you see on TV or online has perfect teeth.

Teeth used to give character to an individual and were sometimes even a symbol of wealth, with gold teeth, or even diamonds set in a tooth.

Gold and blackened teeth date back to the 1300s and 1400s and were often seen in the smiles of West Indians and Eastern Europeans.

In fact, my mother-in-law Hedi, who was Lithuanian, had gold teeth in her set of false teeth, and I jokingly asked her if I could “weigh them in” when she no longer needed them and we often laughed about it. When she died, I did weigh them in and it was worth it!

Trends, for the most part, came and went and very often defined folk for life but were easy to walk away from without social or peer pressure, but the white teeth thing has taken over and every presenter, entertainer, now has veneers.

Looking back, it’s crept up on us over many years and now I’ve noticed that Stevie Wonder (my idol), Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross and the Three Degrees, amongst other entertainers, all had these smiles, but the world probably started changing so fast when Rylan Clark displayed his TOO white teeth and even had them replaced later with a not so dazzling set.

Can you imagine trying to get a job in the media now with your own teeth, and standing a chance of getting it without having them worked on? I’ve never known such peer and social pressure before, because, like Covid, it’s reached pandemic proportions.

Whilst there is a minimum age of 18 for veneers, there’s no upper limit, but what about the cost?

I tried every available website while writing this and not one of them would show or quote a price without contacting them directly, which means that anyone interested would probably be drawn in by a slick operator at the practice, at whatever cost.

I do have a controversial observation about the cost of a perfect smile though, I was watching the news this week about the forthcoming increase in the cost of heating your home, and in an interview a young mum was saying that she couldn’t afford the proposed rise, because she had been through both Covid and the financial crisis.

I noticed that she had managed to pay for an amazing smile and was also holding a massive iPhone. Just saying!

Mark Gilbert is a postman based at Bettyhill.

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