The last bite

Don’t mind the gap

It has long amused me that when alighting from the tube at certain stations, a voice from above entreats passengers to ‘mind the gap’ causing the uninitiated to immediately look upwards instead of focussing on the yawning void below.

Well, no such problem at the recent New York Fashion Week where teeth with gaps (diastemas to you and me) were hailed as ‘the must-have orthodontic trait du jour’.  I had no idea there was a rolling programme of such daily orthodontic options. Designers have been looking for models with a diastema as a sign of beauty. 

The search is now on for ways to open anterior spaces rather than close them. I suppose that at least it keeps our American practitioner cousins in business, first creating more gaps and then closing them again, because, rest assured that in a fluttering of very expensively crafted eyelids, cosmetic dental divides will soon be ‘so yesterday, dahling’.