Consider, for a moment, Taylor Swift’s upper right canine.

About 10 years ago, she chipped the tooth on a microphone during a performance in Philadelphia. Despite the fact that she could have fixed it for the cost of running one of her private jets for about five minutes, she left the jagged “number six” as it was. “Dead Tooth” became part of affectionate Swiftian lore, and producer Jack Antonoff’s favourite nickname for her.

Then, sometime between late September and early October 2023, in between going to NFL games and taking pap walks with Sophie Turner, Swift seemed to pay a visit to a cosmetic dentist to not only fix the damaged fang but refresh multiple other porcelain veneers covering her real teeth.

How do we know all of this? Because the internet was watching, to the tune of 1.9 million eyeballs on just one of many videos documenting this dental development.

“I’m pretty sure she got those premolars redone too, just so it all blends better,” opined dentist Dr. Sara Hahn in a viral TikTok video, referring to selfies taken at Swift’s Eras Tour Movie premiere. “The newer set is wider, and I don’t think it has much surface texture. It looks more even, more square and more white.”

While Swift’s every move is scrutinized more closely than most, it’s not just her teeth that have caught the zeitgeist’s attention. On Hahn’s account “Veneer Check,” which has over 154,000 followers and 7.3 million likes, she analyses the dental work of a wide range of celebrities. There’s real housewife Garcelle Beauvais (“Natural teeth!”), “Saltburn” star Barry Keoghan, whom she believes has a “a single crown” to cover a front tooth that died after it was damaged, causing discolouration, and “Daisy Jones and the Six” actor Sam Claflin — fans pointed out he stopped smiling with his teeth showing on red carpets after his (presumed) veneers were analyzed online.

Like celebrity plastic surgery posts before them, viral videos about celebrity dental work are now a staple of FYPs. There are plenty of dentists armed with ring lights and ready to rate their fellow practitioners’ work, share their opinion on how Kanye West manages to speak with his million-dollar titanium dentures or explain how a lack of “buccal corridors” contributes to Jacob Elordi’s charming gap-toothed smile.

Dr. Jordan Davis has carved a rather critical niche. Chrissy Teigen’s veneers are the subject of a TikTok video with over 8 million views. “You can tell they’re fakes,” said Davis. “They have a feeling of being denture-like.” He is equally unimpressed with what he believes to be Emily Blunt’s “not good” veneers. “They look a little round, a little bulky, they don’t fit well,” he said in another video, this one with over 20 million views.

He’s also zoomed in on Selena Gomez (“her original smile and her natural teeth are much better”; 9.8 million views) and Miley Cyrus (“when you look at the before and after, you can tell immediately that she’s had veneers done, because they look fake”; 1.4 million views).

All of this celebrity dental work is further debated in the lively comments sections. “Once I started noticing veneers, they’re so distracting sometimes when watching movies and TV,” read one reply to the Emily Blunt video. In response to that comment came: “Donald Sutherland kept his hand in front of his mouth in Pride and Prejudice bc he knew his teeth were too white.” (It’s true that Sutherland’s teeth have been a subject of fan consternation ever since that 2005 adaptation came out.)

“The way I make the videos is that people will start asking me if a certain celebrity has had their teeth done,” said Dr. Joyce Kahng, aka @joycethedentist, an Orange County-based cosmetic dentist with 444,000 followers and 14.2 million likes on TikTok. “Then I’ll start going down the rabbit hole and piecing together photos.”

At viewer request, she’s tackled Kendall Jenner, supermodel and oral care brand founder, thought to have recently got a veneer to cover a darkened front tooth, and yes, Swift (to the tune of over 4 million views.)

“I think I had among the first videos about Taylor’s veneers because the people asked for it,” said Kahng, who mentioned her clientele has included “a Miss Korea” and people in the music industry. “In my comments, people were saying, ‘Why are you picking this girl apart?’ and I was like, ‘Dude, you guys asked for this video.’”

Unlike some of her internet colleagues, Kahng refrains from the “total obliteration”-style critique. “Then I think we’re making problems when there wasn’t really a problem. The celebrity might think they have really great teeth. If someone is happy with how their teeth turned out, why give a negative opinion?” she said. “If they look great, I’ll talk about them.”

Case in point: Margot Robbie. “A lot of people come to me [asking about] Margot Robbie’s smile,” she said. “People think it’s because she has perfect central teeth, which is where you tend to look, but it’s actually the way the smile fills in, corner-to-corner.”

In Kahng’s opinion, Robbie hadn’t had any veneers up until recently, when she thinks she added four in the front. “What she’s really famous for in the cosmetic dentistry world is that she has a dramatic drop-off in colour from the front four to the back teeth,” she says. “It looks great on her, but her four front teeth are much brighter than her surrounding teeth.”

It can feel as if veneers are as ubiquitous in Hollywood as Botox, but Kahng is also interested in talking about the celebrities who haven’t had the procedure. “I did [a video on Selling Sunset realtor] Chrishell Stause; people love her smile. People think she’s had veneers done but she hasn’t,” Kahng said. “Those ones are fun, because people realize you don’t have to have perfect teeth to have a great smile.”

That said, she does think Stause may have had some “composite bonding” done, where a resin is applied to change the tooth shape, and possibly a “gum lift” and lip filler, which helps give the smile a youthful appearance because as we age, we tend to show less teeth when we smile.

Kahng observes that reality stars and “people in that range” often get veneers. (Witness the #turkeyteeth phenomenon, wherein influencers flock to lower-cost dentistry destinations such as Turkey to get Chiclet-esque veneers done once they’ve found an audience.) However, she believes many established A-listers don’t partake. “The top celebrities don’t get that much cosmetic dentistry done,” Kahng said. “Maybe they whiten their teeth, but they’ve gotten to where they are without that pressure to have perfect teeth.”

There are two common responses to Kahn’s celebrity dental videos: People who chime in with their own opinions, like, “her teeth were better before” or “they do look really great.” And comments along the lines of “imagine Taylor watching this video and seeing what you’re all saying about her teeth; I would feel horrible.”

Kahng contrasted these reactions to the related genre wherein plastic surgeons list procedures they think celebrities have had. “For whatever reason, in those specialties, people don’t go after them as much, asking ‘Why are you picking them apart?’ People are actually very interested,” she said. “When it comes to teeth, I’ve noticed that people are a bit more sensitive.” Either way, they can’t look away.

“People have been assessing celebrities’ appearances for a very long time — for centuries,” said Lorraine York, a professor at McMaster University who specializes in the study of celebrity. “What’s shifted over time has been the media through which this fascination can be expressed, take root, and, most important, be shared.”

There’s a theory that celebrity worship can be considered a form of secular religion. “Many of us may find some comfort — or perhaps, less attractively, some schadenfreude — in thinking that our ‘gods’ have feet of clay,” said York. Finding flaws in a celebrities’ appearance — yellowed teeth, crowding, a fang-like incisor in the “before picture” — can feel strangely satisfying.

“Celebrity is a system through which people can offer proxy judgments on questions of behaviour and presentation,” said York. “Though we may think we are discussing those who are immeasurably distant from us, we are constantly affirming expectations about how we, ourselves and those we know, should act or present themselves. Finding a flaw is a means of meditating on how we might ‘improve.’”

Historically, celebrities have been negatively judged for image-building or constructing a public self distinct from their private reality, a phenomenon coined “the authenticity effect.” Reality TV and vlogging have pulled back the curtain on how celebrities “assemble themselves or are assembled by others,” resulting in more acceptance of the process. “However, if that construction is understood to be open to only a privileged few — as, for instance, expensive major reconstructive dental surgery is — there can be backlash.”

Teeth happen to be a particularly delicate spot in this tussle between the haves and have-nots. “The disposition of teeth in our mouth is a democratic phenomenon — a matter of hereditary luck,” York said. “The access celebrities have to elaborate and expensive treatments is all too likely to spoil the ‘authenticity effect’ and remind the public of their disproportionate privilege.”

In the end, their veneer of relatability is all too thin.