Bottom teeth talkers and TikTok’s acceleration of beauty trends

I have beauty standards vertigo. It’s a horrible condition, full of self-doubt, confusion and crippling insecurity. This is not a legitimate medical diagnosis (yet), but something I have coined at the abject whiplash I get from TikTok on a weekly, if not daily, basis. One week I’m meant to be getting Botox in my trapezius muscles to give me a Barbie-like shoulder slope, the next I’m rearranging my mouth when I speak so as not to be a dreaded ‘bottom teeth talker’. I’m being asked to figure out whether I’m deer, fox, or rabbit pretty, then to choose between ‘boy pretty’ and ‘girl pretty’. Buccal fat is out, literally sucked out, then it’s back in – youthful, anti-ageing, not to be messed with. Don’t get me started on canthal tilts and ‘doe eyes’.

Depending on the shape of your nose, lips, face or hairline, you – at this very moment – might be deemed good. A winner of the beauty standards pinball machine! The next, oh dear, you’re out. Your (insert objectively normal body feature that you’ve never given a second thought to before) is bad news and needs changing as soon as possible. Until next week, that is.

What is and isn’t beautiful changes more quickly than ever. The world of TikTok beauty standards is an insatiable beast that thrives on trends and frenzied consumerism. Human bodies only have so many parts to unpick, and it seems like we’re running out – trends are becoming more niche, more random and farcical. The recent bottom teeth talker trend is a clear example of this. We’re also running out of logic and reasons behind our beauty trends; instead of saying the quiet bit loud (may I point you in the direction of patriarchy and white supremacy) TikTok users have started assigning different levels of worth and characteristics to our genetically randomly allocated looks.

This is not a new phenomenon, of course, anthropomorphism has been around for a long time. Beauty standards have always changed and we have always assigned worthiness to certain appearances. However, pre-TikTok brain rot, tracing the cause and effect was simpler. Beauty standards made sense, and they were far less personal and hyper-individualistic. In the Dark Ages, for example, it’s thought the ideal body was basically just one without signs of the plague; French and Burgundian women wore a stuffed sack under clothing to look pregnant. Population sparse equals looking fertile good – it tracks. Fast-forward to 2024 and bottom teeth talkers are being dubbed ‘embarrassing’, ‘unattractive’ and ‘performative’.

So, why has there been a rise in this behaviour? “Social media has given us the possibility of connecting to and performing for a literal global audience. The need to belong and the need to be seen and valued underlie our use of social media as we try to understand what is normative and what is rewarded,” explains Dara Greenwood, associate professor of Psychological Science and director of Media Studies at Vassar. Greenwood explains that because we also seek novelty, we want to be informed about the latest trends to understand how to belong and be valued, “so the stage is set for people to consume the latest social media content that ostensibly focuses on how to optimise individual value which then may translate into social value in our current cultural climate.”

Paradoxically, Greenwood says that we want to be distinct in order to feel like we fit in. “This tricky task is of particular relevance to adolescents who are negotiating both identity and social development. Of course, what is misleading about social media is that the ‘norms’ which are on display can be entirely contrived or fabricated by a few content creators, but they may gain traction because they are eye-catching ‘click-bait’. So, there is a kind of self-perpetuating or self-fulfilling cycle that may be set in motion.”

@yeahimcaroline

Someone said they haven’t seen a natural top teeth talker… thats me ig🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️

♬ Hide Away - Daya

Ultimately, I understand the desire to fit into a category. It’s human nature to want to belong and it’s why we take personality quizzes, check our horoscopes and look for commonality with anyone we meet. In some cases, it is harmless. More and more often, it’s not. The world is increasingly becoming individualistic and isolated – communities decimated and replaced with online comment sections. Our need to find categorisation has, in turn, become rabid; we are searching for anything to feel belonging. We are being sold belonging as a commodity (if you want to be a strawberry girl you have to buy this blush), whilst becoming more separated in our pursuit of it. In isolating every small characteristic as proof of worthiness, we are actually creating more ways to make people feel unworthy.

Let me bring you back to bottom teeth talkers. Megan Fox went on a recent episode of the podcast Call Her Daddy and subsequently went viral for talking through her bottom teeth rather than her top. The majority of us had never given this a second thought before, but a handful of creators with millions of followers jumped on the trend to demonstrate which category they fall into – and why that’s a good/bad/cringe/attractive thing. These trends are plucked from nothing, go viral, create insecurity, and then disappear. But the damage they leave is lasting.

One TikTok comment read “I think I’m both???? I still can’t tell which is supposed to be ‘better’?” It’s a panic I see often in comment sections. Young girls and women panicking that they’re abnormal or wrong, unsure of the instructions they are being given – and it’s no surprise, the beauty standards manual is now a whiteboard, being erased and rewritten constantly. With beauty trends coming and going so quickly, it’s imperative not to get wrapped up in an impossible pursuit of worthiness. Chasing these trends (especially via cosmetic procedures) will not provide validation, it will only open the door to more dissatisfaction because our faces and bodies are not wrong as they are.