Welcome to Beauty School, the corner of Dazed Beauty dedicated to learning. From guides to histories, that is where we make clear past subcultural movements and educate our readers on current trends and various goings-on.

We’ve come a great distance since those sexist toothpaste ads from the 1950s. Or have we? While the blatant sexism may need gone, you’ll still see ads with impossibly unattainable beauty standards. Picture a model with chiselled movie star looks and a set of blindingly white teeth as symmetrical as a butterfly. Ah, that Colgate smile! The dominant image of perfect pearly whites hasn’t modified all that much in 70 years. Yet while you peer behind that façade you’ll observe an entire recent beauty landscape. Dental make-up? Grillz? Tooth gems? Not to say natural ‘flaws’ like tooth gaps now flaunted by models and actors the world over.

To place it simply, today straight and white isn’t necessarily held as the final word beauty ideal. So does that mean teeth are the last battleground on which war is being waged against inconceivable beauty standards? We’ll get to that. First, how did we get here? How have teeth evolved in popular culture?

Back within the Sixties, when a hip counter-culture emerged because the rebellious child of the 50s, a recent breed of models and movie stars were emerging. They personified a recent sort of beauty – less straight, more free and natural, mirroring the spirit of the hippie movement – they usually brought their gapped teeth with them. Step forward, Jane Birkin, Lauren Hutton, and Brigitte Bardot, who together with many others proudly bore their gapped teeth in movies and on catwalks. Where once the tooth gap – generally known as ‘midline diastema’ by dentists – was seen as a flaw, it was now something to rejoice, something that challenged fixed ideas about what beautiful teeth might be.

During that very same decade, within the US, gold teeth were also reportedly becoming a fashion statement. This was down in Miami, but contrary to what Scarface fans might consider, it had nothing to do with gangsters or tough guys showing how much dough they raked in. The concept that glinting gold gnashers and social status were synonymous in the general public consciousness would take hold in Eighties Recent York, once they set the hip-hop world ablaze together with the birth of the grill.

The important thing guy within the birth of the grill? That’ll be NYC jeweller Eddie Plein. He’s the self-proclaimed Godfather of the Grill and proud owner of the Twitter handle @IAMEDDIEGRILLZ. Within the mid-80s, Plein made gold caps for Flavor Flav, cementing the NY rapper’s iconic look (the enormous clock chain) with a stunning gold ear-to-ear smile. The trend soon skyrocketed as Plein made grills for the likes of Kool G Rap and Big Daddy Kane. Plein then moved to Atlanta to open Eddie’s Famous Gold Teeth, a custom gold grills store, where he later bejewelled the teeth of OutKast, Ludacris and plenty of more.

The evolution of this beauty trend has led to an entire smorgasbord of types and hues in recent a long time. Let’s break some down. There’s the vamp grill, as seen on the reverse cover of Method Man’s 1994 Tical album; there’s the ultra-pointy gnashers of Riff Raff; there’s Lil Wayne’s diamond-encrusted grill; there’s even Pharrell’s multi-coloured rainbow grill featuring white diamonds.

You would say this dental trend went mainstream with the 2005 Nelly hit Grillz, the music video for which shows the rapper surrounded by dudes and models, all parading their grills, while Nelly sings: “Smile for me daddy / Let me see ya grill.” Realistically, though, it wasn’t until 2013 when the grill spilled out of rap circles. That 12 months, Madonna paraded a gold-plated grill, while Miley Cyrus had a subtle silver one on her lower teeth, and Rihanna sported a gold cross grill to the VMA’s. Throw in Beyonce, Bieber and Katy Perry and suddenly your parents are asking you what this fancy retainer is all about. (FYI: Perry’s $1m dollar grill – encrusted with purple gemstones and diamonds and seen within the music video for Dark Horse  – was deemed the Most worthy ever by the Guinness Book of World Records.)

The grills business is officially booming. Because the industry has thrived, designers have broadened the looks on offer. Juanita Grillz, a custom grills jeweller on the forefront of this movement, can hook you up with anything from neon urchin-style frames to bizarre wire contraptions which are principally a work of art in your mouth. Then there’s the cult LA salon GBY – aka Go Blush Yourself – that may sort you out with 24-carat gold tooth gems. Their gems range from gold charms, Swarovski crystals, to bonafide diamonds. They’re the go-to for gold teeth in LA and count Kylie Jenner, Princess Gollum, and Wolftyla amongst their loyal customers.

Which leads me to tooth gems. These tiny jewels have also taken off lately, emerging as a throwback to the small silver, gold and crystal gems people had bonded to their teeth within the 90s. Adwoa Aboah wore a diamond Chanel logo on her front left tooth eventually 12 months’s BRIT awards; Katy Perry showed off her golden Nike symbol on a single tooth in 2015; and Drake revealed his pink diamond gem last 12 months. It’s one other rising beauty trend that has again fed a burgeoning industry, with recent jewellers like LA’s Tooth Kandy specializing in celebrity teeth bling.

One in all the more eye-catching beauty trends recently is make-up in your teeth. Yep, it’s taking Instagram by storm. Temporary teeth polish lets you swap your pearly whites for a kaleidoscopic explosion of color. The Recent York-based cosmetic company CHRŌM provides a line of 10 colors, which you possibly can mix and match, depending on whether you would like just your canines in red, all the underside teeth blue, or an entire rainbow in the event you really need to show heads. Thankfully it’s smudge-proof and lasts 24 hours, meaning it won’t rub off while you chow down in your Pret lunch.

Dental make-up underlines the concept that teeth are principally just one other a part of your body’s canvas. With that in mind, make-up artist Isamaya Ffrench showed a more experimental approach to dental beauty when she created a series of teeth moldings for the A.Human exhibition by Simon Huck in Recent York. Within the show, which examined the longer term of fashion and body modification, Ffrench’s imaginative moldings appeared like something out of a sci-fi movie, with otherworldly blue patterns coming out on white moldings.

You possibly can see a similarly playful approach when she worked on a shoot for Dazed Beauty with photographer Daniel Sannwald and enigmatic producer Yves Tumor. Within the shoot, which relies on ritualistic practices and mixing old and recent types of body modification, Tumor pulls his lips back to disclose his modified blue and white floral-designed teeth. It’s playful, performative and shows how teeth may be art.

Elsewhere in popular culture – Hollywood, specifically – fake teeth grabbed headlines this 12 months. Meryl Streep reportedly asked for custom prosthetics for her role as Alexander Skarsgård’s mother in Big Little Lies. Why? Because she thought she’d appear more authentic and believable. Then there’s Rami Malek whose fake teeth in Bohemian Rhapsody, he says, helped his performance as Freddie Mercury. Sure, actors have used false teeth for years, whether it’s for laughs like Mike Myers in Austin Powers, or screams like Christopher Lee in Dracula. But now, used more subtly in Oscar-bait dramas, fake teeth are the brand new performance-enhancing tool in every serious actor’s toolbox.

So, where are teeth in popular culture headed? The tooth gap continues to be a mainstay of the sweetness landscape, with Léa Seydoux lighting up screens and following within the footsteps of 90s French pop sensation Vanessa Paradis. Gucci Beauty, more recently, launched its first lipstick campaign with gap-toothed rocker Dani Miller. (On a side note: it’s price mentioning the flipside to this recent dental diversity: that it will probably, in turn, create an unnatural beauty standard, as we saw with the acute example of Tyra Banks reportedly recommending a Top Model have a gap surgically widened to resemble Lauren Hutton.)

Grills, too, have stuck around since Nelly’s 2005 bling anthem, proving they’re greater than a passing trend. That said, the trend hasn’t truly trickled down from red carpets to the streets. Ask yourself this: Could you afford a sparkling diamond-encrusted grill? That’ll be why you don’t see too many. Likewise, installing tooth gems can cost a whole lot, if not hundreds, of kilos, unless you choose for an affordable kit and take the chance of fixing the gems on yourself.

In all likelihood, it’s hard to picture either dental make-up or jewellery becoming as ubiquitous as tattoos. For some people the paranoia that these tiny jewels and marks might be mistaken for broccoli or sweet corn is sufficient to steer them clear. For others, that unattainably symmetrical Colgate smile – all uniformly white as a sheet of A4 – is so ingrained that choosing brilliant green tooth polish could only be seen as a press release or gimmick to grab eyeballs.

Today, teeth feel like the ultimate frontier for difficult inconceivable beauty standards. Whether it’s about presenting a positive body image to the world, to feel comfortable together with your own natural, unique teeth, or whether it’s about just having fun, bulldozing traditional notions of beauty, and fidgeting with color and bling – there’s no a technique of seeing teeth. No single standard. And anyway: who desires to live in a world where everyone has the identical straight white teeth?

Once you brush your teeth tonight let the realisation sink in: that these are usually not mere teeth, mere gnashers with which to interrupt up your food into manageable pieces before swallowing. No. Your teeth are one other canvas to play with. One other place where, in the event you decide to, you possibly can express yourself and say to the world, That is what I’m about, these are my teeth – with a smile they’ll always remember.