Tooth Paint

There’s this constant arms race on Instagram where everyone’s trying to out-weird each other. One day it’s traveling to some cliff somewhere, the next it’s stalking a celebrity so you can get a photo with their face squeezed next to yours. It’s all about attention. Attention’s getting harder to grab.

So at some point someone decided the answer was to paint their teeth.

I’m not even sure who started it—probably some cosmetics company looking for a hook. But the logic makes sense if you’re thinking about Instagram’s rules: the weirder and more colorful, the better. It’s a form of visual noise in a feed that’s already screaming. Gold teeth. Blue teeth. Pink teeth. Take a selfie, grin at the camera, and suddenly you’re different from everyone else for the next 24 hours.

The absurdity of it appeals to me, honestly. Not in an I want to do this way, but in the way anything appeals to you when it’s so perfectly stupid and so perfectly suited to the thing it’s trying to do. It’s makeup for your teeth. That’s the whole idea. It’s not trying to be anything else, and it’s not pretending there’s a real reason to do it other than it’ll look weird in a photo.

I remember when beauty trends used to be about making yourself conventionally more attractive. Smoother skin, whiter teeth, whatever. Now it’s the opposite—it’s about doing something so deliberately pointless that it becomes interesting. That’s its own kind of rebellion, I guess. Against the whole idea that Instagram success comes from looking polished.

Or maybe I’m giving it too much credit and it’s just another thing people buy to stand out for five minutes before the algorithm buries them and they move on to the next trend. Probably that.