The first thing I notice when I meet someone new is usually the teeth. After the handshake that is, which if it’s limp, I don’t even bother looking at anything else.

I find that the teeth can say a lot about someone, and not just about hygiene. There’s the shape: there can be a Madonna-like gap or they can be pointy like a vampire’s or they can be really tiny teeth in manner of a rabbit. They can be squarish or roundish or with an overbite or an under bite. Then there’s the colour – people my age for example, all have teeth with a yellowish hue because we’re the antibiotics generation: our childhood was characterised by doctors who found in Augmentin a solution to all woes.

I like the quirkiness of teeth. It could be because I am slightly OCD-ish about them in an odd way. While most people, for example, make a cup of tea when they’re worried or troubled, I go and brush my teeth and all is well with the world.

But I digress. What I want to say today is: can someone please tell me what is happening to people’s teeth on this island? Everywhere I look I’m seeing the same set of teeth. Every mouth that opens, is showcasing teeth with a capital ‘T’.

Let me give you an example. Have you ever, while zapping television, come across Arani Issa, the makeover series? Even if the show is turning Cinderella’s step-sister into an Angelina Jolie, I am never able to follow the fairy-tale transformation, because all I can see is… the presenter’s teeth.

Joseph Chetcuti’s perfect dazzling set of choppers completely take over his show. They steal the limelight and not just because of their sparkliness. All along I’m expecting him to turn into a manga version of Lupin Arsene, complete with a dramatic background, his right arm lifted up, a flashy beam and a huge, resplendent glint in the corner of his mouth.

Now, look around you and you’ll observe that all of a sudden, lots of people in the public eye have similar teeth, even, dare I say, Madam President’s.

Tom Cruise, when he comes over to film The Mummy, will most definitely feel at home. Everyone has teeth like his, only a bit more, what’s the word?

“Arched,” said a friend of mine.

I don’t want to be seeing myself in people’s mirrory teeth when I’m shaking their hands for the first time

“They’re what I call Arcade Street Teeth,” he said, when the other day I was fretting that lately everyone was going around with uniformly shaped, capped teeth.

What’s happening to us? Why are we all redoing our teeth from scratch? Is it because we’re chomping on so many pork sandwiches that even fillings can’t keep up?

I like flaws in faces: the gappy teeth, the sleepy eyes, the crooked nose. It gives character and identity. In a Hollywood movie, this is sadly only reserved for the baddy; the hero is always a cut-away model with a Julia Roberts smile. Which is why I often get the desperate urge to wean everyone off American movies and instead latch them on to continental films which are full of normal-looking people with refreshingly beige teeth.

So my point is: are we becoming too Hollywoodian? It’s not just the teeth, there’s the winter tan, and the huge, pert breasts, and the complex nails, and the blow-dried hair. It’s like the fashionable thing is to look… fake. In Malta the ‘getting work done’ industry is impressive. The queues at an aesthetic clinic for boob jobs, Botox, liposuction, tummy tucks and all the rest are longer (but quieter) than those at Mater Dei.

Which is fine of course: there’s nothing wrong in trying to look a bit better if it makes you feel more confident. But can we, at least, not all look the same? Can we, if we’re doing some retouching, do it in a way that it looks like we haven’t done it at all, if you know what I mean?

Instead, I’m scared that the new ‘natural look’ is the ‘artificial look’, which doesn’t make us look like us, but like some exaggerated impersonators of us. Therefore, my worry is that soon everyone will be looking the same age ­– neither young nor old – with the same creaseless foreheads and the same body shapes and the same limp hair and the same glinty teeth. Soon Arani Issa will run out of people to transform and wherever we go there’ll be a glazed uniformity.

Most of all though, I don’t want to be seeing myself in people’s mirrory teeth when I’m shaking their hands for the first time.

krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @KrisChetcuti