Hold the front page — Andy Murray has done away with the gap in his front teeth. But he’s stopped short of a Hollywood smile. His canines remain canines.
That this made the papers says something about contemporary journalism, but it hints too at a taste for ‘realistic’ makeovers among celebrities and therefore, inevitably, their admirers. Whoever these people are, there are a lot of them. Many of your patients will be among them. You might be.
It’s hard to stay insulated from celebrity ‘news’. Look at how many pages the Sun, the UK’s biggest paid newspaper, gives over to it. If you feel stigma when taking your free copy of the Sun at the airport, no one has to know about your guilty browse through MailOnline on your phone during a moment of boredom. Much of the traffic to the word’s largest English news website is attracted by the celebrity stories populating its addictive “sidebar of shame”.
A significant minority of celebrity news consumers do actually use celebrities as a guide for how to live. Evidence of this abounds. Remember when footballers used to wear Alice bands? Thankfully they were banned by Uefa, but not before hapless young men could be seen wearing them on street corners. Around 2013, tragically, they switched to the man bun thanks to Jared Leto and Harry Styles.
High end dentists are apparently noticing that the natural dental makeover is in demand. Dr Krystyna Wilczynski, a cosmetic dentist in central London, told the Telegraph that patients “want to make a change, but they don’t want it to be obvious”. She says young men are particularly eager to keep their cosmetic work secret. Chris Dean, director of the Dental Law Partnership and a practising dentist, gave the paper a good line on minimally invasive dentistry too.
Worth dropping a line or two about realistic teeth in your marketing perhaps. After all, love it or loath it, the Sun is only Britain’s most successful newspaper because it anticipates what people want to read better than its rivals.