You’ve probably noticed by now, but something strange has been happening in Hollywood. Something strange and a little uncanny. All the stars, formerly with different faces, are starting to morph into each other around the mouth area. Veneers, once the go-to style of Essex lads and the occasional pop star, have become so normalised on our film and TV screens that it can be hard to remember what real teeth once looked like.
This is a shame obviously. Not just because of the rampant demands of beauty standards (no judgement here by the way; I love a cosmetic tweakment and hold absolutely no “moral” stance on getting work done), but because real teeth can be real cute, too. Kirsten Dunst’s little gnashers made fangs aspirational, and I would have killed for a Georgia May Jagger-style gap tooth growing up. So-called “imperfect” teeth are often what give a face character (RIP David Bowie’s original teeth), and make one person’s face different from the next (as you can imagine, the veneer boom has not helped with regards to my face blindness).
Enter: The White Lotus season three, which so far appears to be a veneer-free zone, marking a welcome change from the white blocks that we’re used to seeing. Aimee Lou Wood especially – who plays the character Chelsea – has such an impeccable overbite, you can’t help but want one for yourself. It’s something the actor has spoken about recently, sharing in an Instagram video that “I’d never seen an actress on TV with teeth like mine,” but that “when Georgia Jagger did Get the London Look and she had the gap teeth, that was a huge moment. And I thought… no, I am going to draw attention to it.”
Wood’s aren’t the only real teeth we’re seeing in The White Lotus. The actor Charlotte Le Bon, who plays Chloe, also has very particular teeth, as does security guard Gaitok, played by Tayme Thapthimthong. It shouldn’t be wild to see “perfectly imperfect” teeth, as one dentist on TikTok called them, but in 2025, it kind of is. As someone with a bit of crowding and a gap where I had to get a tooth pulled out, seeing some actually normal teeth makes me feel a bit better about my own, too. Maybe I don’t need to blow my monthly wage on an Invisalign subscription after all.
Again, there isn’t any moral imperative to keep your real teeth, or your real anything for that matter. We should be past the point of calling people, women especially, “real” or “fake” based on what work they’ve had done, and I’m all for the plastic look, personally. But that doesn’t take away from the joy of seeing real teeth reflected back at us on our screens. Particularly at a time in which societal notions of beauty are more homogenised than ever (God help any casting agent trying to find actors for a drama set pre-2017).
If Jagger helped Wood feel better and more confident about her own unique and very cute set of gnashers, it stands to reason that Wood is probably helping a teenage girl feel better and more confident about hers. And that can only be a good thing.
