Manufactured Imperfections

I've been thinking about this news report from CNN, which suggests that there is a trend for crooked teeth gripping the young women of Japan. A dental surgery in the Tokyo district of Ginza has apparently started offering stick-on sets of wonky gnashers, so that naturally-blessed people can finally achieve that less-than-perfect look. The argument put forward in the article is that these crooked teeth are desirable precisely because they make the wearer less attractive - that 'bad' teeth can help to make beautiful women seem more approachable. Hmm.

There is a sense that the article is attempting to appeal to its readers' sense of novelty; 'Oh, look at those crazy foreign people and how wrong they've got their approach to dentistry! Who would elect to make their teeth worse? Can you imagine aspiring to be ordinary? Ha ha ha!' But the manufacturing of apparent imperfections is not a uniquely 'Other' phenomenon. For an America's Next Top Model nerd like me, this story immediately called to mind Chelsey from Cycle 15. In her case, the gap between her front teeth was deliberately widened (by Tyra's royal decree, of course) in order to give her a different look. Nobody within the show - the judges, the 'clients', Chelsey herself - even raised an eyebrow. Indeed, as this article in the Guardian makes clear, imperfect dentistry (including overlapping veneers) had its popular moment in the US, too. With this in mind, it hardly seems appropriate to marvel at the difference of the Asian other.

Chelsey from America's Next Top Model

The motivations assumed to be behind American's mouth makeovers are notably different to those ascribed to Japanese consumers, though. The Guardian piece talks about the gap-toothed smile as being 'one of fashions most sought-after accessories' and references 'unusual beauty' and 'unconventional looks.' In the case of Chelsey, of course, the atypical dentistry was intended to make her more 'high fashion.' In the case of the Tokyo women, however, the 'fad' is assumed to be the result of something like the inverse of this tendency. It is not seen as a bold, avant-garde aesthetic choice - an attempt to seem beautiful in an extraordinary or an unconventional way - but as an attempt to erase that which might be seen as extraordinary. Western women, the differing coverage suggests, adjust their teeth to appear stunning, whilst Asian women adjust their teeth to seem less confrontationally, intimidatingly beautiful.  

Why exactly these two tendencies - based on pretty much the same idea of manufacturing what one might think of as dental imperfections - should be viewed as being based on two such different motivations I am not quite sure. Certainly there wouldn't at first glance appear to be any obvious reason why 'yaeba' (the Japanese term for wonky teeth) should be any less related to obtaining culturally accepted standards of beauty than the diastema canyon. A gap toothed grin deviates just as much from the all-American smile as does a look involving accentuated canines. As Giant Robot suggests, the crooked smile is available for interpretation as truly beautiful - it's 'cute' when 'everything looks like shards of porcelain.'

Why the difference in emphasis, then? It seems that there are certain discourses of race circulating here - the passive and infantilized Asian female versus the red-blooded and hyper-sexualized Western woman. The white woman opts for weird cosmetic dentistry to seem more unapproachable, the Asian woman does so in order to seem less so. I think the differences in the way manufactured imperfections are reported and discussed needs to be analysed with a critical eye. We need to question those discourses of 'otherness' which ignore points of convergence between cultures. We also need to acknowledge the divergent ways in which we discuss the manner that women of different racial backgrounds subscribe to culturally-defined ideas of the beautiful.