Mouthful

Teeth

Crooked teeth

Crowding, braces, wisdom teeth, and why human jaws stopped fitting.

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Denture Tablets, and Never Hot Water

Denture tablets clean a retainer better than anything sold for it. What not to use matters more, because two obvious choices ruin the plastic permanently.

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Everybody's Move. Yours Are Not Special.

Everybody's do. The lower front teeth crowd inward through your thirties and forties whether or not you ever had braces, and wisdom teeth are not the cause.

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One of Them Works While You Forget About It

The people who switched from Invisalign to braces describe the same thing, and it has nothing to do with the technology. It has to do with who has to remember.

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Halfway Out Is the Dangerous One

Not always, and the answer turns on one distinction. A fully erupted wisdom tooth and a partially erupted one are completely different propositions.

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The Complication Everyone Is Frightened Of

Almost nobody gets it. Almost everybody having wisdom teeth out spends a week terrified of it, counting days and inspecting the hole with a phone torch.

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Nobody Mentions the Retainer Until the Braces Come Off

People finish two years of braces and then find out the retainer has no end date. Nobody mentions it beforehand, and the reason is uncomfortable.

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The Damage Happens Around the Bracket, Not Under It

The white marks left when braces come off are decalcified enamel, formed in a ring around each bracket that a toothbrush was never going to reach.

Editorial illustration: A cracked Neolithic jawbone with perfectly spaced teeth, half-buried in dark soil under a single

Why Human Jaws Stopped Fitting Human Teeth

Crowded teeth are rare in ancient skulls and ordinary now. The teeth didn't change. The jaw did, and it happened far too fast to be evolution.