An Australian dentist is urging parents to heed his warning, or risk damaging their kids’ smiles for good.
Perth-based Dr Maheer Shah says his job has become about far more than cavities and root canals.
“The hardest part about my job is fixing bad dentistry,” Dr. Shah told news.com.au.
“We’re seeing less decay and fewer of those normal problems, but more problems that come with badly done dentistry.”
Those issues, he says, are being fueled by TikTok trends and viral buzz encouraging kids to experiment with tooth gems and grills in risky ways.
Just last week, North West, Kim Kardashian’s 12-year-old daughter, followed in her mom’s footsteps by breaking the internet.
Fans were divided over her grunge-inspired look, which featured fake face tattoos, blue braids and colored contact lenses.
But it was the black grill covering her teeth that raised red flags for Dr. Shah, who fears it could spark a wave of copycat behavior among young fans.
“For a young child, if you’re doing grills, the problem is that they’re going to grow and their teeth are going to shift. So often, I find if they’re really young, the grills just stop fitting after a couple of months,” he explained.
“The teeth they finish high school with are the teeth they’ll have for the rest of their life … any damage done now is damage they’ll carry for decades.”
However, Dr. Shah says grills are the lesser evil compared to tooth gems. A trend he’s seen rapidly grow.
Many youngsters are turning to cheap DIY alternatives to apply them, causing expensive damage.
“You have risks of toxicity from things like nickel or copper,” he warned.
“You can get corrosion in their mouth, you can get a reaction with the fillings if they have metal fillings in their mouth, you can get like a little battery forming with the two metals. That’s usually the concern.”
The process and ingredients within the DIY kits would send any parent racing for a toothbrush for their tween. The first step involves an acidic gel.
“This is a very strong acid, and it basically etches and removes all the minerals out of your tooth. It makes the tooth very rough so that you can stick things to it,” he revealed.
The process also includes an adhesive, which is “actually just microplastics”.
The process is then completed with a light to cure it, which Dr. Shah considers the biggest worry because it doesn’t set the gem correctly.
“The lights we use are very powerful, and even with the really powerful light, you only get about 70 per cent of the microplastics going hard. But with the lights they give you in these little kits, it would probably be 20 or 30 per cent of it actually getting converted.”
He’s already seeing the fallout in his own clinic.
“We had one mum call up yesterday because her daughter had gone on a trip. She came back with a bunch of tooth gems done, and they weren’t done very well,” he recounted.
“The glue was just everywhere, and it was covering her gums … her gums were getting very irritated and building up lots of plaque.”
Removing the gems isn’t a quiet day at work. Taking them out is risky.
“It took me about 45 minutes just to clean the glue off and flick each little gem away,” he said.
“Anyone can just drill them off, but you’ll grind some of the tooth away too.”
He anticipates that the landscape of dentistry is about to change for good because of the demand for accessories, with dentists increasingly called upon to fix the fallout from viral trends.
But Dr. Shah isn’t against tooth accessories, if they’re professionally applied. He is simply urging parents to be open and have a conversation with their kids about how to achieve an accessorised grin safely.
“I never want to be the kind of person to say just don’t do it,” he admits.
“Do your research. If one of your children really just wants to do it, join in the research with them. Go check out reviews. Call up, do a few consultations before you commit.”
