I am so tired of everyone looking the same.
And so scared to look different.
Like most of the rest of the world, my husband and I have dutifully tuned into each episode of White Lotus S3. As soon as we pressed play on episode 1 and met Aimee Lee Wood’s character, I noticed her teeth. I was not the only one.
They are so entirely different from the perfectly shaped, paper white veneers that I am used to seeing on television (and social media) that I actually had to google if they were fake before writing this. Think about that for a minute. I have become so conditioned to the standard being manipulated perfection that I assumed anything less was a character prop, like a prosthetic nose or wig.
In my defense, her teeth are mentioned in the show right away via a quick “British people have bad teeth” joke. Before the joke I had turned to my husband and said, “I like her teeth. No one on TV has normal teeth anymore.” By normal, of course, I meant complete with natural imperfections. Big teeth. Small teeth. Chipped teeth. Stained teeth. Asymmetrical smiles. Etc. After the joke, I wondered if the writers included it in the script out of obligation, a kind of nod to the fact that Wood’s unique smile is impossible to miss on the screen, a place where it’s veneers or nothing.
Of course, Wood is also white and thin. She’s not exactly a great leap for mankind in terms of portrayals of standardized, widely acceptable beauty. But I also wonder if even the writers of the show assumed you would notice her teeth first, that maybe even you’d be distracted by them. Why else mention them immediately via a fairly tired joke? I doubt her teeth play into the plot in any meaningful way. For me, it was a small moment in a very, very long line of moments I’ve had recently where I realize with shocking clarity how very similar everyone is starting to look, how much we’ve come to expect this, and how much it all scares me.
I recently caught up on the reunion episodes of Real Housewives of New York City. This was a controversial season to say the least, for many reasons. But for now, we’ll stick to one moment from the reunion, where Andy Cohen asks Jessel Taanks about her recent “glow-up.” Slowly, she explains that she’s had some Botox. Her fellow cast mates push her to admit to more. She’s also had filler, she explains, and lost some weight. And gotten veneers. She does look very different from her first season; it’s true. Something about the entire exchange poked at me, though.
I should say that plastic surgery and physical appearance is discussed casually on Housewives with the frequency that most people discuss the weather. It is arguably the most appearance-obsessed television series that I have ever watched. When cast members seem threatened or angry at one another, it’s almost comical how often physical appearance is attacked first. Heather gets called Shrek. Monica is called the Pillsbury Dough Boy. Lisa “looks her age,” perhaps the worst insult one can imagine for a housewife. Brittany has high body-count hair. I could go on1. It is clear from watching an episode or two that every single woman is aware of where they stand, aesthetically, in comparison to everyone else. Simply put, there is a very, very, very narrow definition of beauty on Housewives, a show where the most boundary-pushing aesthetic choice made so far seems to be the time Jenna Lyons wore jeans to a reunion.
Having said that, I am a loyal fan. Season after season, I tune in to my favorite franchises. It’s impeccable reality television. But when you watch year after year, it is also glaringly obvious how every cast member, slowly but surely, starts to travel toward the same narrow portrait of beauty. They’re all attractive to begin with, of course, but it’s never enough. With each season, most of them seem to check more boxes: Hair extensions. Lip filler. Boob job. Veneers. Tummy tuck. Filler. Face lift. Better boob job. Better face lift. On and on it goes.
In a way, this mirrors the beauty standards that all women are up against right now. It is a perfect, highly concentrated view into what happens when we all add and subtract from ourselves until we are more similar than we are different. In Jessel Taanks’ first season of RHONY, she had just given birth to twins and is thin by any standard, but vocal about feeling self-conscious about her body. She is also the first and only cast member of South Asian descent on the entire series. She is also naturally gorgeous and visibly wealthy, always dressed in designer clothes and beautiful hair and makeup.
And yet on this show, placed against all these other beautiful women, she stood out (and that’s saying a lot, as RHONY is one of the most diverse casts in the series, both in terms of race, sexual orientation, and body type — the latter I mean only in the sense that not every single person has breast implants) enough that changing herself warranted a formal questioning at the reunion. As a viewer, I found even those minuscule deviations from the Housewives norm refreshing, if I noticed them at all. I’m sure, for her, it felt much different. So of course, she made some of the changes most every other housewife has made with time. I’m sure Andy taking the time out of the reunion to point out those changes, and laud them as improvements by using the term “glow-up” only cemented her choice (Jessel actually responds, “I mean, was I heinous before?” at one point). But can you really blame her? Do you really expect any housewife on the show not to make the same choices? In fact, why don’t we talk about the fact that the series perpetuates and normalizes plastic surgery for everyone — not just the housewives themselves, but the viewers, too? That’s maybe a newsletter for a different day.
Watching Jessel respond to the questions about her “new look” on the reunion, to see this naturally beautiful person both simultaneously praised and subtly criticized for a “glow-up” when she never needed one in the first place made me uncomfortable and sad. I wished she didn’t have to change anything about herself, and I hated that the questions even existed. But I also understood. Look around, man, I wanted to say to Andy Cohen. What woman survives on Housewives without changing their whole fucking face? Who survives on television? Movies? Media? Politics, even? It’s all the same, all the time. If I showed you a dozen celebrity smiles, would you be able to identify even one person from another, or would it be a million copies of one another, endless snow-white teeth bordered with smooth, plump, balanced lips?
But then there’s Aimee Lou Wood, and you would be able to know it’s her. And there is something lovely about that. It is comforting. And not because oh, thank God there’s someone out there who isn’t perfect, but because it signals something incredibly human and refreshing and, I don’t know, alive. We all have these things about ourselves that if we went to a cosmetic dentist or plastic surgeon with an unlimited budget, would soon be smoothed away. We would move slightly closer to the mean. We’d all have our “glow up.” I am afraid that we are losing examples of what it looks like not only to not set out on that path toward sameness, but also of why it’s a choice worth celebrating.
I was browsing the White Lotus subreddit recently and saw the below post and I felt momentarily ashamed. The Times piece I linked at the beginning of this newsletter concludes with a similar sentiment, an idea that is more or less: "Maybe less-than-perfect teeth wouldn’t be so remarkable if we didn’t ooh and ahh like this over less-than-perfect teeth.” Again, I felt a bit silly. But then I reconsidered. Brave is indeed a big word; it implies that there is something difficult about your existence or experience that you are overcoming. It’s loaded. And I don’t think it’s necessarily the perfect word to describe a white, thin, beautiful, successful actor.
But if I am honest, I actually do think, increasingly, it takes a sort of bravery to look even a little different than the standardized, medically-perfected type of beauty we’ve become so used to. Not because it means you are some hideous, ugly thing without it, but because the alternative can feel so deeply lonely. I wonder all the time how many people have booked an appointment for no other reason than because they felt like the only person who wasn’t getting thin/Botox/surgery. The last one left, the odd one out. The clear outlier. There are times of my life when I would have done anything — paid anything — to avoid that very feeling.
So maybe Aimee Lou Wood and her teeth is not about bravery, per se, but about what it means that we are so enamored with her teeth at all. Since I started writing this essay a month ago, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and Cosmopolitan (plus many, many more outlets) have all published pieces on the same subject. By the time I publish this a week from today, I’m sure there will be even more. I can’t help but feel confident it is because so many of us feel strangely comforted by someone else’s very normal, very human (and yes, very beautiful) face. And isn’t that worth considering?
I will never fault anyone for the personal choices they make with their body, not in this impossible, painful world, not once. But I do think that in our desire to not shame anyone who does assimilate, we’ve somehow lost the ability to celebrate the opposite choice, too. The one where you just exist. Where you know what’s too big or too small or too old-looking or too young-looking (I’m sure there’s such a thing) — you always know — but you just let it be. It just is. You just are. It’s an empowering path, yes, but it can also be a very lonely one. It is as scary as it is freeing.
Thinking of someone as gorgeous and privileged as Aimee Lou Wood as brave might feel.. off. It also might feel insulting. It implies that one is operating at a deficit of some kind. But isn’t that what it is to be a woman in this world with a feature that deviates from the mean of perfection? Doesn’t the world treat you differently? Isn’t it obvious every single day? I think the reason the word brave even comes up is because the answer to that question is yes. The reason every housewife morphs into the same form is the same. If someone said I was brave for just living my life as a person who happens to be plus size, I’m sure I would roll my eyes. In fact, I know I would. But the truth is that sometimes it does take a bit of bravery to show up in the world, as a woman, in a body that you are not actively trying to whittle down into utter sameness. It shouldn’t, but it does. And if we are honest about that, then maybe dismantling everything else will become easier, even if just a little.
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