Brace yourselves for a new smile

HOW old is too old to be vain? If it is at the age one is not prepared to disclose one's age then I have reached my limit. So, it was with a certain level of self-wonder that I found myself reclined in an orthodontist's chair two months ago getting braces.

A few people have not unreasonably asked me why I have left it until well into adulthood to fix a problem that could easily have been addressed in my youth. In actual fact, I was never concerned with my teeth back then. It was not until a person I was seeing commented that when we first met he thought to himself, "Pretty girl - shame about the teeth."

Needless to say, we are no longer in a relationship and his thoughts might have been better kept as such.

From that point on, teeth that I had never even noticed to be crooked suddenly seemed to leap out at me from funny angles every time I looked in the mirror.

Often I thought about fixing them, only to conclude I was too old for such vanity.

But of course if I had only committed when I first thought I was "old" a decade ago, I would have been sporting perfectly straight teeth all of this time.

So now I am what is known in the trade as a "brace face". It was a cruel taunt often used at high school, right up there with the wit and originality of "square eyes".

I may not have the fluoro-coloured rubber bands and the braces may be white instead of metal but my toothsome grin can frighten small children all the same.

But it will be worth it to have perfect teeth, won't it?

You can only imagine my despair when I saw a headline in the newspaper only last week that read, "Why having imperfect teeth is now trendy".

My heart sank. All these years coveting straight teeth and I wait until the only season in recorded history where it has become trendy to have crooked ones? Surely not.

But it is true. In Japan at least. A fact I took some comfort from given that "Hello Kitty" and peace signs are also trendy in Japan.

Over there, dentists are being asked to file back eye teeth to become pointed "snaggleteeth" because they are believed to impart to the owner a level of "impish cuteness" or innocence which is (apparently and disturbingly) desirable.

In the same way Chinese women once bound their feet and, in the West, we lather on expensive creams with dubious claims to avoid looking our real age, snaggleteeth apparently conjure up the immaturity of youth.

Although that is a disturbing thought and makes me wonder about the proclivities of Japanese men, I also took from this a comforting thought: braces, too, are something we associate with youth.

So, if I extrapolate my theory further ... while my soon-to-be-straightened teeth may no longer be cool, perhaps the braces are?

Or will the snaggletooth simply be one of those fashion fails, right up there with Crocs, leggings-as-pants, and bum-bags ... except way more expensive to fix when the fashion faux pas is realised?

Either way, I am physically and financially bound to my braces now, so even if it is no longer cool, me and my winning white and dead-straight smile will be coming to a newspaper near you in about 10 months' time.