Drilling Into the Painful Cavities of Celebrity ToothTok

On TikTok, there are the dentist heads — smaller, miked up, parked on the bottom-left or -right corner of the screen — and then there are the mouths. The irritated interior cheeks and uncannily opaque veneers get magnified and green-screened behind the dentists, ready for their diagnosis. Often, these mouths belong to celebrities, whose high-res Getty images invite overanalysis. “Somebody captured a photo of Nicki Minaj holding her mouth open,” Anna Vaysman, a dentist in Scottsdale, Arizona, says in one video (3.7 million views) over an angled close-up of the back side of Minaj’s teeth, which go from bright white to brownish yellow at the border between veneer and tooth. Vaysman, with a wide smile and wider cat-eye glasses, clasps her hands and looks concerned. “Some people zoomed in, and they started asking me questions about the teeth.”

I never asked for this, but the world of social-media dentistry has recently taken over my feed. It has many subgenres, ranging from hygienically cheery to totally deranged in the style of the worst gross-out internet chum. Take the so-called veneer check, for example, a relatively neutral starting point. Most of the videos by Dr. Sara Hahn, a dentist in California, are just a series of photos of celebrities — actual stars like Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift, but also people like golfer Scottie Scheffler and a cast member from Love Is Blind: Sweden — as she calculates exactly when they got veneers. (Her most popular video is an analysis of George Santos’s 2008 drag-queen photo in which she confirms that it’s him by inspecting his teeth.) One of British dentist Rhona Eskander’s most popular posts (1.3 million views) is called “Has Barry Keoghan Done Anything To His Teeth”; yes, she decides, probably. There’s an invasive thrill to it: the zoomed-in pictures of grubby yellowish before-teeth, the career ascendance symbolized by neatly lined-up new chompers.

A cousin to the veneer check is what I’ll call the History of Teeth. It begins with childhood photos and extensive research into anything the featured celebrity has said about orthodontia, then ends with the latest development in their oral life. Margot Robbie, says Joycethedentist, a.k.a. Dr. Joyce Kahng, in one video, “is a hottie and has a dazzling smile. But are her teeth natural? We do know this: braces as a kid, wears a retainer and grinds her teeth, wears a night guard every night.” The findings are inconclusive; Robbie’s teeth seem bigger and whiter, but she’s had the same small knick in one lateral incisor since early adulthood. “This little chip is really throwing me off,” Kahng says.

Taylor Swift is a classic History of Teeth subject, with every stage of her dental journey breathlessly examined. Different dentists have different opinions about work she’s had done, but clearly something has changed since her younger days, when she had a chunky, oblong pair of lateral incisors set higher above her other teeth. “They did what’s called a gum lift,” Vaysman thinks, and she “filled in her buccal corridor,” adding veneers farther back into her mouth and flattening everything out. The account Arcdentistry, run by a Colombian oral rehabilitator, provides regular updates about Swift. “What’s going on with Taylor Swift’s teeth lately?” he says in one recent video. Her new set of veneers have slightly smaller canines, he decides, and “it seems like she’s not wearing her retainer.” She chipped a tooth slightly, which could cause cavities “in the near future.” It’s fandom on a granular level, letting people look down the throats and into the cavities of celebrities — a bizarre, equally mundane version of blogs about things like Olivia Rodrigo’s favorite color (purple). In another video, Vaysman turns her attention to Travis Kelce, who she thinks may have had a front-tooth filling done at some point. “His mom has talked about several visits to the dentist at an early age,” one commenter with a Taylor fan account responds. “Thanks for sharing. I had not read about that,” Vaysman replies.

Other accounts are more interested in dental terror, with posts about celebrities wedged between alarming photos of normal people’s rotting molars and shaved-down teeth pre-crowns. Vikas Prinja, a dentist in London who goes by Thelondondentist, markets himself with hyperactive videos that lean into the sordid side of the industry: His top post is called “Is that MOULD at the back of her throat?” (47.6 million views), and my personal favorite is “Could going to the GYM be damaging your teeth?” He posts about topics like Billie Eilish’s rotated lateral incisor, but he’s more interested in, say, “Cardi B’s tooth nightmare” (one fell out) and Machine Gun Kelly’s elongated, sharpened canines (“I actually do this for some of my patients right before Halloween,” Prinja says).

The ToothTok account where I started, though, is more educational, but with an appealingly blunt angle. Sara Mercier (41,400 followers), a myofunctional airway specialist and orofacial myologist — her work involves diagnosing and correcting weak facial and jaw muscles — is not the only myology expert on TikTok, but she seems to be the only one who expounds on the details of her profession using celebrities as examples. In her videos, she says that Olivia Rodrigo “looks like she has a really deficient mandible”; Sydney Sweeney, with her visible gums and probable lip tie, is “a big oof myofunctionally.” Elon Musk, turns out, has a narrow maxilla, leading to “trout mouth,” and Adam Driver is “an … interesting myofunctional character” with an asymmetrical chin. The commenters who complain she’s being mean, she tells me when I reach her by phone, may have an agenda. “A lot of times, if I click on their profile photo, these people have the same problems that I’m talking about in the celebrity,” she says. “So I think they feel self-conscious or defensive about it. And at the end of the day, they’re probably a little scared.”

Mercier says she makes TikToks about celebrity mouths to raise awareness about myofunctional health. She knows people take offense at her criticisms — “aren’t you a ray of sunshine?” is a common comment — but she compares it to a hypothetical orthopedic surgeon discussing celebrities who have one leg that’s longer than the other to help non-famous unaligned people realize the source of their own back or hip pain. (One commenter recently suggested that Mercier get checked out for lipedema, a buildup of adipose tissue that can cause pain and discomfort. She says she wasn’t offended, and it turns out that she does have the condition.) She started making this type of video after reading in an interview that one of her favorite singers, Ellie Goulding, had anxiety issues and trouble sleeping. “Just looking at her, I can tell that her dental development isn’t going to set her up for success with that,” she says; she thinks Goulding might have trouble breathing because of the way her jaw is positioned.

I point out to Mercier that, according to her TikToks, and many other TikToks from dental professionals, basically every celebrity seems to have some not-insignificant dental or myofunctional dysfunction. She explains that due to how our diet has changed in postindustrial times — more puffed snacks and pouches of puréed food, less tough meat and hard nuts — “our jaws aren’t growing forward and wide like they’re supposed to,” famous people included. She asks if I’ve heard about the phenomenon of “quote-unquote rodent men.” Unfortunately, she says, they’re “at way higher risk for obstructive sleep apnea, and that can lead to heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, a ton of other health problems.” “Here you can see he has a triangle face shape,” she says in her video about classic hot rodent boyfriend Jeremy Allen White. “Mandible far back, receded chin, means it’s into the airway, not enough room for breathing or function.” “This type of analysis would ruin my life lmao,” one commenter says, which is probably why I find it hard to look away from. Just as many commenters are there to request myofunctional profiles of other stars, as if understanding the soft palate of your favorite famous person might bring you a floss’s breadth closer to them.

So does any celebrity have a good mouth, veneers or not? Mercier names Kristin Cavallari and Sha’Carri Richardson. And several TikTok dentists have enthusiastic things to say about Sabrina Carpenter, who has “a beautiful smile,” according to Hahn. “She has pointy canines,” Jordan Davis, a dentist from Utah, says in one video. “I mean, what does that signal to our brains? It’s youthful, because when your teeth first come in when you’re a kid, they’re still sharp. Flat canines signal to our brains, whether you know it or not, that that person must be older. That’s aged looking.” But Mercier disagrees. “She has a very narrow palate,” she says on TikTok. “She should definitely get a sleep study done.”