Oral Hygiene

teeth and bones and stinking breath

Ugghh, just got back from the dentist. While I was sitting there, with my face being variously drilled from within, sprayed, and moved around so someone can get their hand in my mouth deeper, I started musing on how weird the whole dentist thing is. It brought back the interesting history of my own oral hygiene, and I thought it would make a great Substack post—because what’s more interesting than hearing some guy go on and on about teeth?

I’ve always found human teeth fascinating. You can be identified by them; there’s that whole murder-victim aspect where everything else is gone and only the teeth remain. I always wrongfully thought that teeth are essentially bones. Biologists will get cross at me for claiming they’re bones, but to me, they seem very bone-like. Bones contain collagen (which gives them flexibility) and a network of blood vessels and marrow. They are living tissue that can knit themselves back together if broken. Teeth are entirely different structures. They consist of a fleshy pulp core, surrounded by dentin, and are capped in enamel. Enamel is the hardest tissue in the human body—much harder than any bone—but it has no living cells or blood supply. That’s why a broken bone heals, but a chipped tooth is gone for good.

So they are harder than bones, it turns out. But they are technically classed as part of your skeleton. As a result, they’re the only part of your skeletal structure that’s visible without killing you or causing some incredible, atrocious injury. They’re like visible bones, which makes smiling seem particularly alien and weird.

Smiling isn’t entirely unique to humans—certain other primates do it—but most animals, especially in the mammal kingdom, only show their teeth to warn you away. Baring your teeth is a sign that says, I’ve got big teeth and I will bite you. If a dog smiles at you and you can see its teeth, it’s not fucking smiling. It’s growling. So why do humans smile? And what is it with this obsession with perfectly white celebrity teeth?

I could do a bit of a history lesson here about rich people painting their teeth black back in Tudor times because it showed they could afford sugar. The Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I, would have been a minging snog because of rotted her teeth black. I always thought that must be a myth, but then again, these people did all kinds of stupid things, including sticking leeches to themselves when they were ill. So maybe they did paint their teeth black, or maybe the really wealthy ones genuinely just rotted their teeth off with sugar. That was one of the thoughts I was having in the chair.

The other day in class, we were talking about critical race theory and I was explaining microaggressions. It made me wonder if dental hygienists have their own version—not based on race, but based on how you smell when they look inside your mouth. Would a hygienist be as happy to see you if you have terrible halitosis and rotting teeth? Probably not. They aren’t going to be as friendly, and it will surface as a sort of “bad breath dislike aggression.” I like this idea as my current hygienist is always really nice to me, because we both have/had dogs. Weirdly, she perfectly understood my lipless and tongueless pronunciation when told her “uhohuhuh immuh ima” (my dog died) and she had the decency to commiserate me as she took her hand out of my mouth. Defo she doesn’t think I’ve got bad breath. No halitosis microaggressions there.

I’m exactly the same when I work with somebody. They might be a genuinely nice person, but if they’re lazy, shit at their job, or unprofessional, part of me hates them. I can’t respect someone who doesn’t do a decent day’s work or forces me to pick up their slack. If I were a hygienist and you showed up with a rotting mouthful totally your own fault because you couldn’t be bothered to floss—happy to walk around with a stinking hole in your face that causes people to retch—and then you try to chat with me about the weather? Yeah, I’d probably dislike you compared to the guy who gets told, “Well done, you’ve been brushing well and your face is not rotting.”

I’m always happy to be that guy, though I have had loads of shit done at the dentist. When I was a kid, the dentist said my mouth was too crowded. Interestingly, I have the exact same problem in my spine. Too many fucking bones, too many fucking teeth. They gave me two options: wait until my wisdom teeth came out and have them removed—which is incredibly painful, and I feel fucking sorry for anyone who goes through that—or pre-empt the crowding by removing a shitload of teeth immediately.

My childhood dentist was severe but good, so I had four molars removed when I was about eight. I was put under full anaesthetic. I remember them giving me the gas, telling me to count to three. I thought, That’s a piece of piss, I can count to three. Next thing I knew, I was gone. Just f trippy shit. I actually really liked being put under because the drugs were so good, even though I knew I’d wake up in pain, my tongue constantly returning to the unfamiliar, empty sockets where my teeth used to be. My mouth is fully crowded again now because the wisdom teeth eventually came in, but nothing got too crooked thanks to that brilliant strict dentist.

After that, there was a long stretch where I just didn’t go to the dentist once my parents weren’t in charge of taking me. As a student, I didn’t go at all—except for one time when my girlfriend complained about the smell of my face. That made me paranoid, and it’s a big reason why I take oral hygiene so seriously now. I have a f tongue scraper and everything. I remember being quite gutted that, even after visiting the hygienist, that girlfriend still dumped me. Though in hindsight, the bad breath was probably just a byproduct of smoking a lot of skunk back in those days, and falling asleep on the sofa, stoned with red wine lips.

I went to Japan and didn’t visit the dentist there, either. Then I moved back to the UK. It had been something like seven years since I’d seen a fucking dentist, and I knew I had to go. I went to a clinic in London, and the hygienist was this Eastern European lady who instantly terrified me. She seemed personally affronted by the fact that my mouth was a mess and she had to clean it. At the time, I remember thinking, Jesus Christ, your job is to clean my mouth. Why are you so pissed at me? I didn’t do it to piss her off; it’s just that some nights I forgot to brush because of the skunky wine thing.

She was furious. “Why you don’t floss?” she demanded. I explained that my teeth are pushed together so tightly that the floss just shreds before it even gets between them. “Okay,” she said, and proceeded to file down the edges of all my teeth so I could floss more easily. That felt pretty extreme—it’s losing enamel, after all. Never grows back. Filing someone’s’ teeth... isn’t that what mental people who think they are real vampires do?

But that was nothing compared to the actual cleaning. First, she spiked my gums with that sharp little prodding hook to check their health. Every jab was agonising, and the anticipation of which tooth she would poke next was pure torture. Then came the water flosser. Oh my god, it was horrific. She must have cranked it up higher than legally allowed. I could feel my gums being blasted back down to the roots of each tooth with every blast. I actually started hallucinating. I had my eyes closed, the white noise of the implement whining in my ears, and I saw these red geometric triangles. They arranged themselves into scorpions that danced around and stung the inside of my mouth and my eyes. My whole skull was vibrating with pain. I swore to myself right then that I would never skip the dentist again. Next time I went back there, it was a different person and when I mentioned the scary lady he looked around as though afraid she’d jump out on him if he spoke ill of her.

Then I moved back to Japan. By this time, I was a grown-up, married, and expected to do things like go to the dentist. We looked around, and all the local clinics were shit. The shocking thing about dentists in Japan is that most of them won’t clean your entire mouth in one sitting. They’ll just do the top half, and then make you come back the next week for the bottom half. It’s ludicrous. A week later, the top half already feels dirty again, so you never get that lovely, completely fresh feeling. It seems incredibly arbitrary, and I was convinced they only do it so they can charge you for two visits. But BORINGLY and predictably it’s the government’s fault. A strict limitation of the Japanese National Health Insurance (NHI) system stipulated that a dentist can typically only bill for about 30 minutes of time per appointment. If a full mouth cleaning takes 45–60 minutes, doing it in one sitting means the clinic works for free for the second half. Once, a stupid dentist cleaned the bottom half, then I went back the next week and she started cleaning the bottom half again. When I asked if she was going to do the top, she checked her notes, realised she’d fucked up, and said, “Oh yes, I’ll do the top half now.” Proving exactly why it’s stupid not to do it all in one go. But then the idea of them rushing around with all that pointy pain-inducing gear isn’t gonna relax anyone. Fucking stupid governments.

Eventually, we found a really good dentist near my house. The guy is obsessed with technology—every time I go, he’s bought some new machine or device. They also have a massive, posh, expensive fish tank in the waiting room, which I fucking love. I’m really happy with him. It doesn’t hurt nearly as much, and as far as I know, the hole in my face doesn’t stink too badly. That’s a crucial aspect since my day job involves walking around and talking to people in close proximity, explaining why their essays suck.

Speaking of essays that suck, I don’t really know the purpose of this oral hygiene essay. But if you haven’t been to the dentist for a long time, make sure you’re not stinking up everyone’s personal space. And if you have ever experienced the kind of pain where you hallucinate triangular red scorpions stinging you in the face, please leave a description in the comments, because I would love to hear that shit.

REN AND STIMPY GUM HOLES!

FILLING FACTS

These dentures of AI wisdom are here simply to fill time and space, and I haven’t checked any of them so beware but I’ve no reason to doubt them.

True Crime

• The Acid Bath Murderer: British serial killer John George Haigh dissolved his victims in vats of sulphuric acid in the 1940s. He bragged to the police that they couldn’t charge him because there were no bodies. He was wrong. Acid dissolves bone, but it doesn’t dissolve acrylic resin. Police sifted through the sludge and found the pristine upper and lower dentures of victim Olive Durand-Deacon. Her dentist identified them, and Haigh was hanged.
  

• Ted Bundy’s Overbite: Bundy was notoriously careful about not leaving fingerprints, but he was convicted because of his teeth. He left a savage bite mark on one of his victims. Police took a dental mould of his highly irregular, crooked lower teeth, and the forensic match was the linchpin that sent him to the electric chair.
  

• The First Forensic Dentist: Paul Revere (the American Revolution midnight ride guy) was actually a silversmith and amateur dentist. He is credited as the first forensic dentist because he identified the rotting body of his friend, Dr. Joseph Warren, after the Battle of Bunker Hill. He did it by recognising a specific silver wire bridge he had wired into Warren’s jaw months earlier.
  

Historical & Biological Weirdness

• Waterloo Teeth: After the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, scavengers descended on the battlefield with pliers and yanked the teeth out of tens of thousands of dead soldiers. These teeth were shipped back to the UK, boiled, strung onto ivory plates, and sold as high-end dentures. Rich elites were literally chewing their dinner with the teeth of dead infantrymen.
  

• Nightmare Tumours: Teratomas are rare, horrific tumours where your cellular development glitches out. Instead of just growing a lump of cells, the tumour starts growing random, fully formed body parts. Surgeons regularly cut teratomas out of people only to find them packed with hair, brain tissue, and fully formed human teeth.
  

• Eye-Tooth Surgery (OOKP): There is a real medical procedure used to cure certain types of blindness called Osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis. Surgeons pull out one of your teeth, drill a hole in it, fit a plastic lens inside, and stitch the tooth directly into your eyeball. Because the tooth is your own tissue, your eye doesn’t reject it, and the tooth anchors the new lens so you can see again.

So there you have it. TEEEEETTTH. And I kept my writing deadline by the skin of mine so there you go.

Next week, I will be explaining in all the full and total glory why I was obsessed with Sam Kriss, and why he blocked me out of sheer intimidation and fear because I’m so much better than him in every way. Now THAT post will have real teeth.