Tin grins are in with image-savvy tweens

By Elizabeth Wellington
Knight Ridder News Service

•	The new options Today's braces wearers have many more choices: Stainless steel. These are glued to the teeth and strung together by wires. Colors range from silver to gold-plated. Ceramic. The brackets and wires are clear or tooth-colored. Popular with adults. Invisalign. These are clear, retainer-like contraptions. Must be changed every two to three weeks.

Tweens and teens, girls and boys, are clamoring for the hottest accessory — metal orthodontic braces.

We're being straight with you. Those very same torment-magnets you prayed you'd never have to wear (and suffered with if you did), those silver teeth-adjusting contraptions aren't accompanied by taunts of "Metal mouth!" anymore.

Braces are must-haves for middle-schoolers, right up there with jelly bracelets, lip glosses, Undee Bandz and B2K posters.

"I was excited about them!" exclaims 13-year-old Tess Liebersohn of Philadelphia.

"I thought the colors (on the brackets) were cool. I don't know, I thought they were ... what's the word? Modern? Technological, or something? I thought they would make me look smart."

Those who study tween desires say we can thank adult celebrities such as Gwen Stefani, Cindy Crawford and Cameron Diaz for making braces cool.

Manufacturers have made the braces less cumbersome and the wires malleable so they are more comfortable. Many companies have added extras to the packages to personalize them: multicolored elastic O-rings hold the wires in place; colorful rubber bands add pizazz while moving the teeth; and wires can be gold-plated as well as silver.

In Hawai'i, middle school and junior high students tend to go for colored or metallic braces, Honolulu orthodontist Kimi Caswell says. Oddly enough, so do 30- and 40-year-olds. But those in their older teens and 20s more often than not opt for clear or invisalign styles that don't stand out, she said.

"Most of our teens, bottom line, is they want to look good," Caswell says. "If they have crooked teeth, they want straight teeth."

The difference these days, she says, is that they have so many choices.

Philadelphia-based Twentysomething Research president David Morrison says the real reason behind braces' popularity with the younger half of Generation Y (those born between 1979 and 1994) is that Americans no longer view physical imperfections as weaknesses that can't be fixed.

Braces, like Botox, tummy tucks and face-lifts, are proof we're not ashamed to take our quests for aesthetic perfection public, he said.

"These days, we are all about the cosmetic enhancements," he says. "This is a time of the nip and tuck, the extreme makeover. There is a goodness in the process: A little pain means a lot of gain. Teenagers see that and want and emulate it. They are thinking about the long run."

Since the American Association of Orthodontists began tracking them in the United States and Canada more than 20 years ago, the number of orthodontic patients has more than doubled. In 1982, 2.4 million people were in the process of straightening their teeth. By 2000, the most recent year for which figures are available, that number jumped to 5 million.

Orthodontists are detecting teeth-alignment problems earlier, and the majority of new braces-wearers are tweens, 9- to14-year-olds, who are demanding them, says Pam Paladin, spokeswoman at the Missouri-based association.

"Within the past five years, we've heard lots of funny stories from doctors who had kids who were heartbroken when they were told they didn't need braces," Paladin says.

Fourteen-year-old Isiah Vaughn hounded his mother for braces for months. One of his teeth on the top row jutted out something awful.

"I wanted them," says the Sicklerville, N.J., eighth grader, who alternates between all-blue, all-black and all-white O-rings.

"It was just one tooth, yeah," he says, "but I wanted to look good in my senior pictures."

"I just knew it would be neat to get them," says 13-year-old Isabel Ricker, Vaughn's schoolmate at J.R. Masterman High School in Philadelphia.

Ricker favors wearing red and green O-rings on alternating teeth.

"It's like you get them for two weeks and people don't even say anything," schoolmate Petra Artz, 13, sulks. "Unless they are totally unobservant and then they notice, but by then it's like, 'Duh!' "

Advertiser staff writer Tanya Bricking-Leach contributed Hawai'i information to this report.