On the one hand, I stand opposed to bleached teeth. People who bleach their teeth are creepy, untrustworthy, preening, weak-willed.
They like to watch themselves in the mirror when they have sex to see how good their triceps look. Bleached teeth say, “Would you care for a time-share in Cozumel?” or “Your wife’s cute; do you two like to party?” Bleached teeth feel like they’re hiding something.
If bleached teeth were a person they’d be Donald Trump Jr., with his puffed-up chest and slicked-back hair and gleaming lapel pin and genetically weak chin and the terrified look in his eyes that says, “the reason I killed the prostitute is because my father told me I would never be a real man.”
Maybe you think I’m being judgmental. And if so, you’re right. But I’ve spent years cultivating the kind of persona where I hope the first thing people would say about me is, “Oh, he would never bleach his teeth.”
But. On the other hand, I don’t want to look like someone who died six months ago and no one bothered to tell him.
This tension was at the heart of my dilemma. To be a schmuck with bleached teeth or to disgust people and frighten babies and dogs? An existential question prompted by the fact that someone sent a photo around in a group chat and it looked like four normal people and a guy who had been chained in the basement for 16 years, was only permitted to eat Oreos, and then they brought him upstairs and put him in a navy merino sweater and told him to smile for a camera.
More questions. Like: How long had I looked like this? And: Is bleaching your teeth an unforgivable act that brings you spiritually closer to Hollywood talent agents and presidential candidates who’ve had babies out of wedlock with their hairdressers, or is it something you eventually need to do so you can keep blending in, sort of like power-washing the bottom of a boat?
If you’re walking around with seaweed and barnacles in your mouth does that make you a principled person or someone who isn’t good at maritime maintenance?
I didn’t have to wonder how to go about getting my teeth bleached. Because I have a dentist in Beverly Hills. On Wilshire, in a medical mid-rise, in an area I like to call “veneer alley.” You can’t crash a convertible Mercedes while zogged out on lorazepam on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills without hitting a guy who wants to show you how far “cap technology” has come.
My dentist, Dr. Upsell (name withheld to protect the cosmetically inclined), has always treated a teeth cleaning like an insurance-covered bridge drug to get you into a new smile. Do your dentistry on Veneer Alley and when you’re ready to turn to the dark side (or the 20% lighter side?) you’re already in the neighborhood.
Dr. Upsell had actually already broached the topic with me. “What do you know about teeth whitening?” he had said to me, suggestively, last year. He’s a man in his 30s with fitted scrubs, tasteful tattoos, and forearms striated by many mornings at Equinox. “It’s easy. The kind we do here in the office is most effective.” To which I said, “Do I look like Donald Trump Jr. to you?” “No,” he said, “but I know the guy who did his teeth.”
So the next time I saw him I told him I was interested. I don’t want to go too far, I said, maybe we could just do it a little at first. What do you mean a little, he asked. Well, I don’t want my teeth to be too white. I don’t want them to look whitened. Oh god, he said, we couldn’t make your teeth look like that. Gosh, I said, thanks.
When I walked in for the procedure the following week, something weird was going on at the dentist’s office. They’d started a renovation, but kept the office open. The furniture was gone, the carpeting was gone, the concrete floor still had ribbons of glue with little bits of shag on it. It looked like a set up for an elaborate con job. Like tomorrow I could come here and open the door and find an insurance office with ringing telephones and a receptionist who looks at me quizzically when I ask where the dentist is.
When it was time for my treatment a woman named Donna came to get me. She seemed sleepy and bored. I asked where Dr. Upsell was and she didn’t answer. It seems he was, in some ways, more of a bleach salesman than a practitioner. Donna sat me down in a dentist’s chair. I laid back. We were on a high floor and through the tinted windows the sky appeared the deepest mediterranean blue. She mixed up some solution and then opened some plastic pouches and took some instruments out. Then she pushed a TV on a swivel in front of my face.
The only thing I could see now were three morning show hosts that were almost life-sized. She asked me some muffled questions but I couldn’t understand because of her medical mask. She showed me a bunch of fake teeth attached to something like a long comb, each different color. This tooth, she said, was closest to my current color. It would be a benchmark. Then she took some slurry she’d mixed up and squirted it in my mouth. She told me it was a solution that goes on your gums so they don’t hurt. She painted another substance on my teeth—that was the peroxide mixture. The whole thing felt like less like a medical procedure than a visit to a high-end nail salon.
She said: tell me if you feel any discomfort. Then she left the room. She was gone for a while. I wondered if she had left, with the rest of the office, because of the dental con job. But no. When she came back, I said I had become uncomfortable. What is the sensation she said. It’s the sensation of little jumper cables being attached to each of my teeth with enough current to light a tasteful floor lamp. Oh, she said, you’re sensitive. Yes, I said, I am sensitive to running AC current through my mouth. Fine, fine she said, and then said something else, but I couldn’t understand her. She cleaned the solution off a few minutes later.
Did my teeth look whiter? They did. They now looked like a different fake tooth from my benchmark tooth. Did they look really weirdly creepy white? Not at all. My kids couldn’t tell I’d had anything done. Was it more of a big deal than advertised? A little, just like every medical procedure that causes what practitioners described as “a little discomfort.”
The bigger question I had, when I realized that I was too embarrassed to tell anyone that I had bleached my teeth (except all of you, apparently) is what kind of person it made me? A vain person? Someone Don Jr.-adjacent? Honestly, the answer was yes. I look at Truth Social’s second most popular poster and I think: maybe I should have a little more compassion for people who must use hydrogen peroxide to try to hide from at least some of the fear that crushes them every waking moment. We all have a little Junior in us.
Thus is the yin and yang of being fifty years old. All the cosmetic shit you once looked down on and judged suddenly seems like options you must consider. Not a ticket to some psychotic dream of post-human perfection like people who get lip injections at 27, but a ticket to continue not to look like a piece of fruit that’s fallen out of the tree and is rotting into the ground. Will it end here, with slightly whiter teeth? I’d have to say yes? I don’t know. Ask me in ten years.
Devin Friedman is a Los Angeles-based writer
