My Tooth-Whitening Hell
Hello,
My name is Fenella Harpy and Problemchildbride has graciously allowed me to use her blog to highlight my plight and throw myself on the general bosom of humanity. Here is my story.
It all began when I looked in the mirror one day and discovered I simply wasn’t as attractive as I’d like to be. Up until then I’d been just about as attractive as I wouldn’t like to be. Following this realization, I reeled backwards and collapsed into my lucky armchair, rolling my head about with my fingers thrust up through my hair at the temples. That is to say, in a traumatized way.
I sat there for a while in a bit of a funk, mouthing silent “whys?” at the overhead light fixture, when, as chance would have it, (O! Fickle Chance, thy name is abhorrent to me now!) my eye espied a spectacle. I told Mr. Harpy to put his spectacle away and as he did so I happened to glance at an open magazine. A man, broad of grin and entitled of eye, smiled out at me, the staple in his forehead only lessening his dazzling handsomeness a tiny wee small bitty. In his hand he held a box of Crest Whitening Strips which he was also – helpfully, I thought – pointing to with his other hand in case we hadn’t noticed it.
The thought occurred to me immediately and I banged the heel of my hand against my head declaring myself a doofus for not having thought of it before. With whiter teeth I could be more attractive! (Even more attractive, if I might say so. I don’t want to brag but I have never yet thrown myself out of bed on a cold night. I’m that cute.)
I ran off immediately to tell Mr. Harpy the news and all about the plan I was even then hatching to get me some of these whitening strips. He cautioned that they might make my snaggly, mis-aligned teeth more noticable (I have British ancestry) and perhaps a modest hand covering my mouth when I smiled would be a better course of action if sustainable attractiveness was what I was after. Snorting dismissively at his out-dated attitude, I hied me down to the nearest chemist shop and bought up their entire tooth-whitening inventory.
Let me tell you, fellow travellers, I was dazzled by the beyond-whiteness of the confident smiles I saw on these promotional leaflets; much moved by the pinky pinkness of the healthy, healthy gums. A whole new way of being was opening up for me and I had my figurative spotted hanky on a metaphorical pole all ready to set off down that road.
And that was how it all began: innocently, experimentally, as these things often do. Once-a-week whitening started to not seem like enough. Pretty soon I was at it every day. As the adverts promised I was whitening on-the-go too with invisible plates “because you love life too much to spend hours whitening!”
Then I discovered the handy purse-sized tooth-touch-up pen and that’s when things started to go wrong. I was spending more and more time at work in the Ladies, anxiously peering at my mouth with a dentist’s wee mirror to see what lunchtime’s cod in white sauce with boiled potatoes had done to mar my precious pearly whites (I was on an all-white-food diet by then too, to minimize staining). The management noticed and I was given a warning. 3 warnings and an official letter later I was given the humiliating sack.
Low on money I moved to a caravan on the outskirts of town, a blighted spot with a blighted tree, but there I could whiten unmolested. By then my teeth were almost translucent from the bleach. If I gurned with my lips apart, teeth clenched together, you could see right through to my tongue behind them. Once, a tooth shattered when Maria Callas came on the radio. And still I whitened. I couldn’t get them as white as I craved.
There was no great revelation, no epiphany, no intervention was staged to drag me back to the world. Slowly, only very slowly, it dawned on me that I had become a tooth-whitening addict. Now when I looked in the mirror I saw a smeared and grubby woman with haystack hair, sitting in a midden with a manic smile that would blind me for minutes at a time if I looked directly at it.
One grey, rain-lashed morning, I lurched from my caravan and, clutching a holy book, staggered bravely underneath that twisted, wind-blasted tree and back to the town to my dear friend Problem. She took me in and now here I am trying to work my way back into society.
I never realized what was happening, see. Oh sure, I noticed that all my friends had started wearing sunglasses when I showed up but I thought they were just messing when they shook me by the shoulders; only teasing as they held me down and slapped me round the face, screaming “Will you wake up to yourself, woman! Will you look at what you’re becoming!” Way beyond the point where I could recognize rhetorical questions, I would reply No and No, smile slightly at their yellow-toothed folly and dazzle them to their knees. Who needs friends anyway?
Friends, what I am asking from you today is money. Lots and lots of your money. Heaps of it. Having a whole lorry-load of money is the only way I can afford to pay a top-lawyer to sue Crest for their insidious marketing schemes. Did you know you can buy “starter-packs” of whitening gel? They act as gateway whiteners, inevitably leading to heavier and heavier use, and they are blatantly advertised to our teens. They’re on the shelves of most supermarkets right now! These Crest people, these Rembrandt scallywags inhabit a seedy underworld of gleaming offices and impeccable manners. Implausably impeccable. They have the dentists on their pay-roll and they’re out to get YOU! It’s a scourge on society.
So!
Send money with all possible haste!
(No post-dated cheques please. And no buttons in with the coin.)
Update: I’m not against tooth-whitening particularly, it’s just that the bar seems to be rising – expensively – on what’s considered normal minimal-level personal grooming. But then I live in Southern California among beautiful, expensively touched-up ordinary people where seeking body-perfection is practically a past-time, so maybe my view is skewed and regular people elsewhere don’t feel they need to spend a bucketload to keep up and look normal, as it were.
January 22nd, 2008 at 9:36 pm
White hair and gold teeth or gold hair and white teeth? It’s purely a matter of taste which is better. The same goes for toothpaste, which comes in many flavours.
January 22nd, 2008 at 9:50 pm
O sigh! Sweetest of Nanas, you are always my first commenter and we all know the first comment is the deepest. *Blush*
Gold incisors are abominable.
January 23rd, 2008 at 12:33 am
Dear, if I may — I am an attorney, you know — such a case would undoubtedly be taken on a contingency basis: No recovery, no fee.
Alas, I’m afraid though a jury might only award you a lifetime supply of Folger’s Coffee and a recommendation that you alternate Crest strips with shots of espresso.
At least, that’s what I’d settle for.
But then, I only an attorney; not a top notch attorney.
Cheers.
January 23rd, 2008 at 3:16 am
Why don’t you whiten other things too? Make it all even. Get some white-out and just go head to toe with it. Or is it the teeth that are important? I’ve never been very good with comprehending addictions.
Now if you’ll excuse me…I’m going to look at shoes.
January 23rd, 2008 at 4:01 am
Maybe you should buy him a spot in hell.
http://www.spotinhell.com
January 23rd, 2008 at 5:34 am
Do they glow in the dark too?
I imagine that they glow in the dark. Not sure why, but I do.
January 23rd, 2008 at 9:09 am
For every Yin there’s a Yang. For every whatsit there’s a whatsit (but a different one). My point being, could you not darken your skin instead – A Whacko Jacko in reverse. Then your tooths would “appear” amazingly white.
January 23rd, 2008 at 10:50 am
It’s a dental anorexia besooth! Oddly I watched a programme the other night with frightening photos of raddled teeth as a result of the whitening strips.
As for moolah – sadly I have over stepped my charity budget ( see today’s post ) for the next month or so. Do you think that’s what Kim has done
(whitening strips) to get that sparkle?
January 23rd, 2008 at 10:50 am
Sam, if you have Tippex about the house would you get rid of it quickly, before Fenella finds it…
January 23rd, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Oh, Fenella! Money won’t help you. I suggest you study Erin Brokovitch and take it from there.
January 23rd, 2008 at 12:51 pm
whitening strips? what are these weird thing of which you speak. do we have them in Britain. What weirdness!
January 23rd, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Fenella, you probably already know this, but they touch up those teeth in the Crest advertisements. Isn’t that just lower than a snake’s belly in a wagon rut?
My eldest adolescent, who has a beautiful bunch of normally-colored (off-white) teeth and near-perfect dentition, is convinced that she must gild the lily and use whiteners. Perhaps I could get you to talk to her, but please skip that bit about British ancestry: she won’t get the humor and will use your amusing hyperbole to reinforce her argument.
Wish I could help you out with the money, but I fear you might regress and go out and blow it on more whiteners.
January 23rd, 2008 at 6:58 pm
What a morality tale! Have you thought about printing it as a children’s story (Gerald Scarf style illustrations spring to mind)?
Failing that, send me a photo and I will whiten the teeth in Photoshop.
January 23rd, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Rand, you’d do it for Fenella pro bono though, wouldn’t you, hun. This is clearly a case where justice must be served, to hang with the money. You’re one of the good guys. As it goes i’m not one to denounce all lawyers as pariahs. Pirhannas maybe. I’m just messing. There is that breedof lawyer though that will happily sell their souls to the Great Greenback in order to turn a buck or a hundred thousand. Would it help if I said you’ll always be our top notch attorney? *Blush*
Kara, perhaps you need a 12-STEP program to KICK your shoe habit? Bwahahaha! Sigh. I’s the girl who took the wit out of the word twit. I’m such a t. Sorry.
January 23rd, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Maree, Hi! and Ha! I like that idea. Thanks for the link and cheers for stopping by and commenting.
Carolyn, Fenella’s do glow in the dark. She’s had trouble with light aircraft thinking she’s a landing strip on stormy nights.
Sneezy, but look at lions – they’re kind of tawny and their teeth are manky, all hung with baby gazelles and stuff. Shocking consumers of coffee too, the lions. The best attack is still to go for the teeth, according to Fenella. I listen to her because she bares her teeth twitchingly when she says so and I’ve found it less painful to agree as soon as she’s sounded her warning snarl.
Pat, it is. It’s like tattoos or piercings or exercise for some people. Once they start they just can’t stop. Pretty soon it takes over and they’re left just hollow, painted, buff, shiny people who can’t get through the metal detector at the airport. Colourful, tragic shadows. One could weep.
Conan, apparantly she doesn’t think Tippex is white enough. She’s looking for that arctic, almost blue whiteness. That whiteness that goes beyond whiteness and nearly into a whole other colour. Mind you, given the way the arctic’s melting they’ll be more blue blueness up there than anything else. Maybe only global warming can save Fenella now.
Eryl, I told her money wouldn’t help but then she said she’d cut me a Finder’s Fee for all you good people and, you know, it’s funny, and you’ll hardly believe me when I say so, but then I had to agree that money would indeed help quite a bit. Her pecuniary reasoning helped me talk myself up from “not at all or a smidge at most” to “really quite helpful indeed.”
Birchy, I think you do have them in Britain. How else would you explain this?
January 23rd, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Mary, “amusing hyperbole”? Have you had a really good look at British teeth? There’s nothing amusing about them, it’s a very grim topic. And my hyperbole was actually restrained understatement at the state of the nation’s chompers.
Kim, when I was five, the scariest story I heard was read in school to us. It was about a wee boy who refused to brush his teeth, ever. Then one day he had a blackberry pie, the seeds took and blackberry bushes started growing out of his mouth. I’ve never been able to get the book’s hideous illustration of that out of my head and I can’t pass a bramble bush without an involunntary shudder. Also blackberries are very staining. According to Fenella. We’ve discussed it.
January 23rd, 2008 at 9:12 pm
Oh my God. Next there will be talk of spray on tans and highlights and augmentation and just easing out a few lines here and there. It’s a slippery slope!
January 23rd, 2008 at 9:24 pm
I’ve tried the strips and after a few applications found that my teeth were highly sensitive to heat and cold. I figured it was marring the enamel in some way and I’m guessing I was right.
I think the expensive treatment at the dentist’s is safe, though.
But FMC’s right. Slippery slope and soon you’re looking like Nicole Kidman.
January 23rd, 2008 at 10:54 pm
fmc, I’m not particularly against tooth-whitening or anything. It just seems we can’t let ourselves alone any more. Who’s got time to think about anything at all with all these increasing demands on our time and money? Highlights, fine – you’ve got to go to the hairdresser’s anyway. Spray-on tan if you like, I don’t care less what other people do but it’s becoming almost an expectation that ordinary people do all this teeth-whitening and wrinkle-reducing stuff just to not stand out. Perhaps it’s just where I live.
Medbh, I’ve tried it myself and it didn’t work that well but it’s just that suddenly we all seem to be expected to pay out for expensive dentist treatments in order to be considered normal. The bar on acceeptable personal maintenance is rising.
I have both male and female friends here who cannot believe I’ve never had a manicure or a pedicure, far less that I don’t have them monthly. Where are people getting the money for all this? It’s not cheap!
Again though, I do live in So Cal and people here are damn near perfect. I reckon I might have askewed idea of how society’s going.
January 24th, 2008 at 12:31 am
I?m sorted Sam, just call me Gummy. Think Les Dawson and you?re there, no cosmetics, no teeth. I drop the falsies in a glass of sulphuric acid each evening and hey presto, a strobe light mouth without the epileptic fit.
January 24th, 2008 at 10:25 am
Hi Sam,
You get my email ?
January 25th, 2008 at 8:28 am
White is over-rated, and I think it looks horrible and unnatural to boot.
The faces in Kansas City always struck me as having horrible shiny teeth and horrible shiny eyes, but once you travelled a couple of hours outside (by car not bicycle) you were back in the land of humans again and away from the Stepford nonsense.
From my experiences of SoCal you’re probably getting the most extreme case of it on the planet. Just say no. Just don’t do it. But then you see I like a woman with yellow teeth and a crooked smile.
January 25th, 2008 at 10:46 am
Medbh: Is looking like Nicole Kidman meant to be a threat? If so bring it on:)
January 26th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
I’m from SoCal. We’ve got plenty of less-than-perfect people there, but they tend to push us out of the spotlight. When people come around with cameras, they shove us into corners. Seriously: go and check out Disneyland’s hiring policy sometime. I’ve heard that anyone with acne or crooked teeth doesn’t get to work where anyone can see them.
I’m comfortable in Scotland.
January 27th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Ah yes life as an extreme makeover. It reminnd’s me of those cardboard Bunty dolls years ago where you pegged on new outfits. Now you just peg on a new face and 6 veneer teeth!
As someone who refused reconstructive surgery after cancer, I could see why sacrificing my shoulder muscle to make a new breast and then slapping a silicone sack on top of it was such a good idea, I really can’t get my head around all this tweaking, especially when the folk concerned have generally run their bodies into the ground first.
January 27th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
If you have new bosoms can you breast feed? I’m not asking for myself you understand.
January 28th, 2008 at 4:09 am
It’s weird. Just reading about it, despite the horrors of your decline, gave me a craving.
January 28th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Pat, Nicole Kidman looks like a freak. All of her natural beauty has been surgically removed and botoxed away because she was so afraid of the aging process.
Sam, Demi Moore has those teeth that are so white they’re blue.
January 29th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
After my pirate experience last year, I’m just glad to have teeth at all
January 30th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Big white teeth would be very useful, you could project movies onto them. You know, should you happen to possess a movie projector gadget. And should your tv break. And should you have a friend with big white teeth who would be happy to sit, mouth agape, for three hours whilst you watch “Return of the King”. If they were adventurous, they could do monster impersonations with their tongue during the scary bits.
January 30th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
I’ve decided to NEVAH go to So Cal. I’ll save myself the heartbreak. Thank you, thank you.
January 30th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Hello?
Where’d Sam go?
January 30th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
Woo-Hoo, Sam.
Hearty congratulations to you on your Irish Blog Awards nominations.
Huzzah!
January 31st, 2008 at 5:49 am
Sniffles, but can you gurn?
Eolai, what on earth were they doing to their eyes in Kansas City? How did they make them more shiny? Were they filing them with emery boards? Shaking them up with gravel?
Pat, she is looking less natural these days. Her eyebrows are positively Vulcan. I haven’t seen her animated for a wee while right enough so they may just be touching up her photos but she has that frozen look now in those.
Mary, what a magical and welcoming kingdom Disney offers to the spotty kids who only a few years prior to that were their customers, whose parents they probably milked for money at every turn. That’s a disgusting practice. I wonder how they’d handle it if they took someone on who subsequently developed acne? I hate that place anyway, it’s one giant headache.
Anna, the tweaking industry is booming. It seems to be occupying more and more of people’s lives. I worry about my girls growing up with these unnatural bodies all around them.
Pat, I have no idea how lactation works with implants. I know a nurse who had her’s done and seemed to think she could breastfeed just find. Fake boobs just seem like a really bad idea though. And apparently they have to be replaced every ten years or so. Anaesthesia is a big deal – I wouldn’t want to be under it any more than I had to be.
TIV, hello! Thanks for coming round. A couple of years ago I knew a couple who had had special veneers put on their 3-year old’s milk teeth. She’s a beautiful child. I don’t know why her parents thought they had to improve on her, and worse, what message that might send to a young mind.
Demi Moore appears to be bathing regularly in a tank of preservative formaldehyde. Blue teeth would not surprise me.
Kim, I thought you were a lovely pirate.
Asym, I doubt such a person would be willing to sustain the possible wrinkles from all that gaping. There’s an ad out here which asks do you suffer from wrinkles? Suffer I kid you not. I mean nobody wants them but I hadn’t realised they were quite such a source of suffering as all that.
Jali, yet I do like the people I’ve met here a lot. I feel bad now for painting a picture of a crowd of idiots. So Cal people are just as smart and just as dumb and just as credulous and just as cerebral as people anywhere. They do have to spend a lot more time wearing less clothes though with the heat, so maybe that’s something to do with it. And of course Hollywood doesn’t help. Thing is, I reckon I’d like them just as much without their little extras here and there.
Birchy, I’ve got a few projects on that are occupying some time at the moment. Nothing I consider a chore or anything but it’s leaving me with not enough time to get around reading all my pals even, far less posting.
Medbh, thanks darling. And the same to you too. Smashing news!