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Oral Victories
Your Mouth and Teeth Are a Portal to Your Inside—and Say a Lot About Your Outside
YOU Test: The Real Tooth
Look in the mirror. After taking a moment to admire and primp, open wide. Take a close look at your teeth. Yes, beyond the popcorn remnants. And the taffy. Are the tops of your bottom incisor teeth and bottoms of your top teeth flat or somewhat jagged?
If they’re flat, that indicates that you could be a teeth grinder—putting you at greater risk for wearing down, breaking, or splitting your teeth and leading to gum and mouth problems as you age, not to mention your looking like a jack-o’-lantern.
If our ancestors could see us now. They used their teeth for two things and two things only: one, to shred their fire-cooked meat and feast like the hungry warriors they were. And two, as a last line of personal defense, biting off attackers’ ears and noses. Us? Oh, let’s see. We use our teeth for such vital tasks as whittling toenails, tearing open cellophane wrappers, and carrying bags when you have kids in both arms.
It’s not that we don’t appreciate our own meat cutters. It’s just that the invention of such things as knives and fruit smoothies has shifted our priorities. Our teeth and mouths aren’t quite as essential for survival as they used to be, yet they’re still critical to our happiness. The mouth serves as our entrance portal for food and our exit shaft for words, songs, laughter, gas, and salmonella. That’s not even mentioning the fringe functions: Mouths allow us to kiss babies, taste falling snow, bite in self-defense, and earn elite status as a sexual dynamo. For your purposes here, however, it’s important to note that your mouth is more than a mere functional tool; it’s a key indicator of your vitality, your beauty, and even your ability to get a good job and spouse.
Your teeth, in addition to helping with a wide range of tasks and with chewing, are also a very clear marker of your health. If your gums are inflamed, your teeth are falling out, or your teeth are getting ground like fresh pepper from wear and tear, those problems can affect and reflect the health and beauty of your entire body.
As part of your smile, your teeth serve as one of your main markers for beauty. Together, your teeth and mouth act as a stage: You want that stage to be bright, white, and well lit. Though there’s no direct correlation, the common perception is that our oral appearance is linked to our cerebral powers. How? We equate snow-white teeth with high-powered brains. Just add a set of Bubba teeth to your mouth. Not only will you scare off neighborhood kids, your perceived IQ will immediately drop 20 points (and your real IQ will fade, too, due to gum inflammation).
YOU Test
Check the insides of your cheeks for a small, whitish ridge running parallel to the biting surface of the teeth. If you have that line, it likely means you’re a grinder, and on a subconscious level you use your cheek to keep the teeth from touching.
Your Mouth: Beauty Markers
On the surface, it would seem that mouths are as nondescript as file cabinets—they all look about the same. But if you think about it a bit more, you’ll realize that mouths are much more like fingerprints or eyes—on the surface they are similar, but the difference is in the details. Think of how mouths convey emotions—a smile at a lover’s gaze, a frown at a lover’s propensity to adore remote controls, a gasp, bewilderment, anger, or the inner happiness that you can’t hide. And that’s not even taking into consideration that lips come in all shapes and sizes. There are thin ones and plump, full, juicy ones. So it should be no wonder that your mouth is a messenger in many ways.
Plastic surgeons have pored over thousands of pictures of beautiful men and women to come up with the perfectly proportioned mouth (tough work, but someone’s got to do it), and this is what they’ve found. Rulers ready?
The width of the mouth should be roughly 1.6 times the width of the bottom of the nose (what a coincidence—the golden ratio!).
If you drop lines down from the inner part of the colored part of your eyeballs, your mouth should fit right between those two lines.
Your upper incisor (front) teeth should be visible below your upper lip for 1–4 millimeters and your lower teeth should not be visible when your lips are open. As you get older, the upper lip drops and you see less of your upper teeth. At the same time, your lower lip sags, exposing more of your lower teeth. When Shakespeare mentioned older people as “long in the tooth” he was describing this drop. The real reason for being “long in the tooth” is periodontal disease, where the gum recedes and the bone follows. That creates triangles of space between the teeth and exposes their roots.
Your upper teeth should also overlap the lower teeth by 1 millimeter.
Your jaw should be level. How can you tell? Take a double-wide Popsicle stick and bite on it. If your jaw is asymmetrical, the stick will tilt.
Stink Mouth
We all know the nasty feeling of holding a conversation with a person whose breath smells like three-week-old leftovers. And we all pray that we’re never the source of such stench. Bad breath (or halitosis) comes from lots of places: Some stems from food getting trapped in pockets in the tonsils, some comes from the stomach, and still more originates from the tongue—where the stench from bacteria buildup can clear a room. Some even comes as a side effect of medication (as is the case with Benadryl). One good way to handle bad breath: a tongue scraper, which removes bacteria and takes some of the stink away. Some research shows that the tongue scraper reduces nasty compounds on the tongue by 75 percent (compared to only 45 percent by toothbrush alone). You need only about ten seconds. Just take the scraper and run it over your tongue. If your breath is just relentlessly offensive, talk to your dentist, who might even prescribe a few days of antibiotics. Your dates (and coworkers and subway companions) will thank you.
Now, we’re not suggesting that you go in, cut around, and move your facial features a smidge here or smidge there (though there’s more on cosmetic procedures in the appendix), but we are suggesting that there are objective standards to beauty (and you automatically calculate those when you look at others—almost instantly, even if you got a C in algebra). And if your mouth’s features don’t measure up to a perfect score along these scientific standards, there are still plenty of other ways that you can make the most of your mouth. Let’s take a closer look at the anatomy of the mouth when it comes to ideal standards of beauty (we’ll talk about health implications in a few pages).
Lips: We all know the main things we use lips for, so we’ll leave the sexy details to your imagination. (OK, back with us now? Good.) If you’ll allow us to go from sultry to scientific for just a moment, there’s more to know about your pinkish pucker. In the ideal scenario, the upper lip should be slightly larger than the lower with a gentle curve that peaks at what’s called a Cupid’s bow. The upper lip is divided symmetrically in two by two vertical lines under your nose called the central philtrum. The color of the lips also reflects what’s going on inside, as pale lips reflect anemia (lack of red cells or abnormalities of red cell contents) and blue reflects lack of oxygenation of blood (which can come from many causes). As we all know by now, lips—like faces, fat, and breasts—are a supreme target of the beauty counter and the plastic surgeon’s tools, and we’ll talk in more detail about these options in our YOU Tips.
Teeth: One thing we know for sure about mouth beauty: If your teeth look more like randomly shaped shards of glass than perfectly aligned chompers,