15 years ago I got veneers — now my teeth keep falling out

A couple of times a year, one of my veneers falls out. It’s happened so often at this point that it’s become a recurring joke among my friends: How will Edgar’s fake teeth fall out next? Will it be from eating corn on the cob? Biting my nails? Recently, the evil culprit was a stale pan dulce at a friend’s birthday party in New York. The party was country and western-themed, and my tooth that fell out was the exact one that, in a movie, an actor playing the role of “Hillbilly” or “Bumpkin” would have blacked by production out to signal the character should be seen as poor and dumb. I tried to laugh it off, though on the inside I was mortified: Those were the stereotypes I was trying to counter when I first got my veneers installed in 2009, when I was still in high school. 

Back then, the only people getting veneers were celebrities like Tom Cruise and Hillary Duff, who could afford the 5-figure price tag for a quality set. My family, like most Americans, didn’t have that kind of money to spare. In Orlando, my mom worked as a barista at Starbucks, making a little over $20,000 a year. We both had the same teeth: jagged and growing inward, with dark cavernous gaps between them. I brushed mine obsessively as if to wash off the word DIRTY I felt was written on my forehead. Unlike me, however, my mom owned a cheap pair of flippers: those perfect, creepy-looking fake teeth toddlers wear in beauty pageants. When she put them on every morning, her face lit up, and she was free to go out into the world with her head held high.

I’d begged my mom for braces for years, but there was no way she could afford both the initial installing fee, plus the return to the dentist every couple months to tighten them. It was a miracle if we went once a year at all. Veneers, on the other hand, were a one-stop solution, though at three times the price. In the end, she paid for them with credit cards, and even then, she didn’t have enough credit for a whole set and could only purchase me enough to cover the top row of my teeth, which the orthodontist assured were “the only ones people see anyway.” They were $8,000—almost half her annual salary. A few months later, she would declare bankruptcy. 

As shortsighted as my veneers might seem to some, to my mom they must have been an investment in my future. Before I got my teeth fixed, I was an ambitious kid with a near-perfect grade point average. I dreamt of clawing my family out of poverty and giving my mom the life she deserved. Then one day, I was expelled from high school on drug charges after a student lied to the campus police about me being a dealer. By the time I started at my new school, the future and all my lofty goals had begun to feel childish and naïve. There was something that seemed preordained about the expulsion, like it was the first step in what was bound to be a lifetime of failures. Deep down, I worried that if I didn’t have straight, white teeth, I would never be successful, the same way I worried my being gay and non-white would inevitably hold me back. 

The veneers helped restore my faith in the future. Staring at my new $8,000 smile in a handheld mirror at the orthodontist’s office, a flicker of hope stirred inside me for the first time in forever. If this could happen, then maybe I was wrong about being destined for failure; maybe there were good things ahead. When the orthodontist informed me I would have to replace my veneers in 15 to 20 years, I shrugged his words off, figuring that adult me would have no problems with money. After all, I had a smile like Hillary Duff. Who wouldn’t hire me?  

Now the 15 years is up, and I don’t have anything close to the $10,000 I need to replace them—and that’s if I’m lucky, since a decent porcelain pair can run up to five times that. It turns out getting my teeth fixed wasn’t the secret recipe to getting rich that I’d hoped. 

Don’t get me wrong, my veneers have come with some sweet benefits. Whereas my old gap-toothed smile gave away that I was poor, my shiny new teeth imply wealth, a healthy lifestyle, a lifetime of regular trips to the dentist. Like wearing eyeglasses, they even make me look smarter. “You can tell a lot by someone’s hygiene,” a man once told me on a first date. “Bad teeth are a deal breaker for me. I want someone who takes care of themselves.” I nodded politely, while privately remembering how awful it felt as a child when others assumed my natural teeth were a result of not “taking care of myself,” as opposed to a combination of biology and difficulty accessing healthcare. It was one of the worst and best compliments I’ve ever gotten.

To tell you the truth, I’m not above playing into stranger’s assumptions. My veneers are the first thing people see at job interviews, and I take full advantage of that. I didn’t go to an Ivy League university. I don’t have family connections in any industry. But I can smile like my life depends on it. These days I’m a writer, which you’d think is the one career where appearance doesn’t matter, yet with the rise of social media, writers are increasingly expected to be full-fledged brands. With the pressures of keeping up a platform and invitations to speak on panels and read my work in public, I find myself having to smile more than ever before. 

This would be fine, except for the problem of my veneers falling out. Every time it happens, I’m thrown back into a past that I tried so desperately to forget, and once again I’m that insecure teenager who doesn’t see the point in trying. Making a living as a writer is difficult enough (for reference: for my last book, my publisher paid me $15,000, before taxes, spread out over three years), and with my mom aging out of the workforce and increasingly depending on me for financial support, it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to save $10,000 to replace my teeth anytime soon. 

Want smart health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon’s weekly newsletter Lab Notes.

I don’t feel sorry for myself. I won’t lie; I did get a good run out of these bad boys. But I do wish that 16-year-old me had been better prepared for the responsibility of maintaining veneers. Even so, I don’t regret getting them. If I hadn’t had the procedure done at such a crucial point in my life, I wouldn’t be where I am today, both because of the confidence they’ve given me and the doors they’ve opened in my profession. At the same time, I’m nervous about where I’ll end up if I can’t keep them. It helps that I’m not alone in my fear. Losing your teeth is consistently ranked as one of America’s top nightmares. It just so happens their nightmare is my daily reality. 

I’ve been lucky so far. I found a dentist once who glued one of my teeth back on for $50. Others have done some clever maneuvering with my dental insurance, which I only have because of my partner. Each time, they send me off with the warning to be more careful, because next time the damage might be too drastic to repair. I try to stall however I can: brushing and flossing after every meal, avoiding eating hard foods like apples. 

I feel oddly comforted by the fact that other people are just as desperate as me to have beautiful smiles. Nowadays, I can’t turn on a TV set without seeing a celebrity with a pair of blinding white veneers, whether on reggaetón stars like Bad Bunny or drag queens like Sasha Colby. But veneers aren’t just for the rich and famous anymore. It isn’t strange for average Americans to opt to have the procedure done. Some of them fly to Colombia or find “dentists” on TikTok who promise veneers at a fraction of the cost. I would do the same, but I’ve read too many horror stories about people cutting corners to get quick fixes only to end up with botched smiles. 

Seeing this latest rise in veneers, especially among influencers, reminds me that they weren’t simply a vanity procedure for me, but directly linked to my ambition. When I was younger, I believed I needed the perfect smile just like I believed I needed a fancy suit and tie to complete the illusion that I was someone worth giving a chance to. Whether my plan worked? It’s hard to tell. What I do know is that the profession I’ve chosen often places me in the public eye, something I would have never done as a teenager when all I wanted was to hide. 

The irony is that now that I’m in my 30s and fake teeth are everywhere, the people I envy most are the ones with natural, imperfect smiles. I love a gap, Zendaya’s slight snaggle, all those little personal details that separate a face from the rest of the crowd. I feel envious when I see strangers biting into apples, not worried about the consequences. Meanwhile, I can barely look at a corn on the cob without flinching. It’s been said before: You never know what you have until it’s gone. As the expiration date on my veneers rapidly approaches, I can only hope that in the next few years, I’ll figure out a way to keep smiling.