‘Turkey teeth’: Have veneers lost their shine?

The quest for perfect teeth dates back thousands of years: the Romans infamously swilled urine for a brightening effect (which, though disgusting, is not as insane as it sounds given that urine contains ammonia, a bleaching agent). While there’s no longer any need for a piss rinse to achieve a winning smile, we’re still obsessed with perfecting our teeth – the global cosmetic dentistry market size was evaluated at $25 billion in 2023 and is projected to swell to around $54 billion by 2033 – but there are signs we’ve reached peak pearly white.

Today, if you have the means, one of the ways you’re able to buy your way to perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth is by getting veneers. First created by California dentist Charles Pincus in 1928, veneers were made to temporarily change the appearance of actors’ teeth during film shoots, but in the decades since veneers have only become more and more accessible – especially given the rise of dentists in countries like Turkey offering procedures (which often involve aggressively filing down the patient’s teeth into small stubs) at extremely competitive rates.

While the cost of veneers can vary from clinic to clinic, on average a full set of veneers costs around £2,000 in Turkey, compared to up to £20,000 in the UK. Today, 150,000 to 200,000 UK residents visit Turkey for cosmetic dental procedures every year and according to research published in 2023, one in ten young people have had veneers fitted. The situation today is a stark contrast to the past when veneers were aspirational and largely only worn by Hollywood stars, and as a result, tastes are shifting; after all, status symbols are only really able to confer status if they’re exclusive and inaccessible. Travelling to Turkey for cosmetic dentistry has now become so popular that the trend has catalysed the creation of a new (and slightly disparaging) neologism – “Turkey teeth” – and pin-straight, snow-white teeth are no longer in vogue, as wealthy tastemakers seek to distance themselves from ‘the masses’.

Of course, it’s worth acknowledging that at £2,000 a pop, Turkey teeth are still prohibitively expensive to many. But while the elite and the precariat have remained depressingly rooted in place at either end of the British class system, over the course of the last century the middle class has ballooned in size. In this context, the upper-middle classes have become increasingly anxious to differentiate themselves from the so-called nouveau riche. “We love nothing more than mocking other people’s tastes – and the working classes are easy targets,” explains Professor Meredith Jones, a cultural theorist at Brunel University London. “The more we mock someone for their ‘cheap’ or ‘tacky’ things, the better we can make ourselves feel about our middle-class or upper-class choices.”

Reality TV stars – often drawn from the ranks of the lower-middle classes themselves – are often lambasted over their ‘new money-coded’ appearances online. Many viewers of this season’s Married at First Sight UK have taken to X to deride the show’s participants: “There’s a reason I stick with MAFS Australia… this is just full of chavs with filler, Turkey teeth and bowl haircuts,” one user wrote, with some singling out contestant Adam Nightingale’s veneers as an easy target for mockery.

Earlier this year, Love Island contestant Tiffany Leighton was relentlessly trolled online for her veneers: Leighton later told The Sun that after exiting the villa and seeing the vitriol directed at her teeth, she attempted to reverse the work she had had done. Another former Love Island contestant Sam Gowland was also mocked after unveiling his new veneers in August, with people on social media likening his teeth to “piano keys”. Gowland hit back by posting a TikTok video expressing his bafflement at the deluge of criticism he’d received: “How can you say that they do not look good? They are so white […] I got the natural look.”

@samgowland_ Starting to REALLY annoy me now !!! #veneers #teeth #dentist #fyp #foryou #trolls ♬ original sound – samgowland

“Working-class bodies are nearly always marked as excessive, as too much, and Turkey teeth are a classic example,” explains Ellen Atlanta, author of Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women. But she adds that working-class people themselves might not perceive Turkey teeth in the same way. “In working-class culture, often the whiter and more artificial, the better, because it’s the overtness of the beauty labour that shows you are a body of value, and that you should be included in society.”

While it’s debatable whether Gowland’s teeth do look “natural”, he’s right to note that the dominant beauty standard values looking natural over anything too obvious or blatant. As Atlanta points out, it’s common for influential women to “employ beauty work in order to achieve a level of fame before reversing their beauty work once they have reached an unassailable level of success and want to be taken ‘more seriously’”, citing Molly-Mae Hague going back to her natural teeth and dissolved her filler in 2021 as a prime example of this. “Society still prizes ‘natural’ beauty as virtue, with middle and upper class people still undertaking beauty labour, but in increasingly undetectable ways,” Atlanta continues, with the elites who dictate tastes now undergoing cutting-edge procedures which produce remarkably subtle results. Case in point: it’s long been suspected that Kate Middleton’s highly coveted smile is the result of a little-known procedure called ‘micro-rotation’, where braces placed behind the teeth subtly shift their alignment to create “harmonious asymmetry”.

@dentist_emi One of my all time favourite smiles #princesskate #beforeandafter #dentist #orthodontics #fyp #royal #royalfamily #katemiddleton ♬ original sound – Dentist Emi

There’s evidently a very, very fine line between what tastemakers consider ‘good’ or ‘bad’ teeth. While perfectly uniform teeth are now sneered at, at the same time, many of us will remember people taking to X to mock working-class rioters’ poor teeth in the wake of the spate of far-right violence this summer, rehashing cruel, dated stereotypes about working-class people with poor oral hygiene. “We can see conversations online praising celebrities like Sabrina Carpenter for the shape of her natural teeth [but] the same praise isn’t applied for ‘natural’ teeth that aren’t magically sparkling white or relatively straight,” Atlanta says. “As usual, we’re granted a degree of freedom within a set of narrow constraints. We’re still held on that same tightrope – if our beauty work is too overt, our efforts too obvious, we face ostracisation once again.”

This obsession with having ‘the right sort of teeth’ is arguably one of the most potent examples of how ridiculous beauty standards can be: they’re still meant to be white and straight, but not too white and straight. It’s banal but worth reiterating that there’s really little use in trying to keep up with these standards when fashions are liable to change at a moment’s notice. Remember your teeth aren’t superfluous accessories either – they’re a vital, functional part of your digestive system. Don’t worry if they don’t look ‘perfectly imperfect’: if you brush twice a day, use mouthwash, and floss if needed, you can’t go far wrong.