Liz Jones: I Spent Nearly £7,000 on Turkey Teeth—A Mistake

My female celebrity crush is Keira Knightley. I adore everything about her — the voice, the eyebrows and those slightly wonky teeth — so I’ll be watching the second season of Black Doves when it arrives on Netflix next week. I’ve seen her in Atonement countless times. To me, she is radiant, her imperfect smile illuminating the screen. Charming. Real.

But when I watched the film again recently, I was startled to discover that it was no longer Knightley who held my attention. Instead, I found myself looking at Vanessa Redgrave.

Her character, Briony, grows up during the war, before the NHS was created. She lived through rationing and is later shown as an elderly woman dying from vascular dementia. Yet none of that was what caught my eye. It was her teeth. They were so dazzling they could have blinded a man at 50 paces.

Perfectly straight, dazzlingly white and clearly expensive, they seemed completely disconnected from her difficult past, her age and the life she had lived.

Then the awful truth dawned on me. ‘Oh my God, no,’ I thought with a shudder. ‘I’ve turned into Vanessa Redgrave!’

For years, my teeth were marked by stains, countless fillings, cracked veneers and receding lower gums. But after travelling to Istanbul last year for new Turkey teeth, I now have a flawless set of young-looking pearly whites. They are, I have to admit, beautiful and natural-looking.

There is just one drawback: they are now framed by an older face.

I had imagined that my new smile would give me a fresh lease of life. I had wrecked my enamel during my teens and twenties, surviving — while suffering from anorexia nervosa for decades — on TaB soft drinks and Cox’s apples.

I wanted the immaculate teeth of the Princess of Wales and all those other women in the public eye. I imagined feeling more confident and sociable, no longer embarrassed to laugh in daylight or kiss a man.

So, like the 200,000 other Britons who travel to Turkey for dental treatment each year, I decided to take the plunge.

At a high-tech Istanbul clinic, dentists fitted immaculate, Armageddon-proof crowns over my teeth, which had been drilled down to tiny stubs. Artificial intelligence and lasers were used to improve the precision of the treatment.

I also underwent a gum transplant. Tissue was cut from the roof of my mouth and stitched over my exposed roots — making the phrase ‘long in the tooth’ feel particularly appropriate.

The same smile would have cost about £30,000 in the UK. In Turkey, my treatment came to just under £7,000, not including flights and hotels.

Once I returned home, I genuinely felt transformed. I stopped drinking red wine in case it stained my new teeth and found myself smiling far more often.

I became more positive and started taking greater care with my appearance. I even stopped going to bed in the same jumper I had worn all day.

My teeth had become something I wanted to live up to rather than let down. Unfortunately, the rest of me did not seem willing to cooperate.

I have deep hollows on either side of my mouth, while the skin on my chin is pitted like a crumpet. I had hoped to look ten years younger, but instead my new teeth seem to cast a powerful spotlight on every other sign of ageing.

In fact, my 24 perfect crowns now seem to be body-shaming the rest of me. Even the Uber Eats delivery driver noticed my smile. ‘My God, your teeth are amazing,’ he said, before entering my date of birth into his phone, taking a second look and shaking his head.

It’s as though I’m wearing a miniskirt; inappropriate, somehow.

And so my shiny new gnashers have become another way for me to feel like a fraud, unhappy in my skin.

I am like Bette Davis in What Ever Happened To Baby Jane: a grizzled, grotesque ghoul in babyish ribbons and lace, the daubed rouge and painted eyebrows only emphasising her loss of youth.

Feminist academic Kathleen Stock wrote in an essay that modern plastic surgery is now skewing physiognomy: the notion you can literally see someone’s mind or soul in their body and face; that reliable associations can be made between moral character and appearance traits.

She writes: ‘It starts to look psychopathic that we culturally approve of faces being sliced up and rearranged into stiffly impersonal, generic masks, for no other reason than the owner’s vanity.’

She even accuses plastic surgeons, and by extension cosmetic dental surgeons, of violent assault.

‘When you look in the mirror, the eyes, nose and mouth may all be in roughly the right places, but even you may not be able to tell who is looking back.’

At the moment, if I gurn in the mirror, I’m reminded of Donald Sutherland playing Lizzie Bennet’s dear old dad in the 2005 film of Pride & Prejudice. A toothy ghoul!

Kris Jenner, the 70-year-old Kardashian matriarch, now resembles her daughters after a facelift. Doubtless, she feels she is now the best version of herself. Thing is, she never looked this good, even when she was young. She has erased her history.

I’m guilty of the same vandalism. I no longer, thanks to my Turkey teeth, have a chipped front tooth.

When I was 12, my mum was washing my hair in the kitchen, as it was the only room with a small, electric heater. I was giggling so much, I crashed my teeth against the edge of the sink. Mum was devastated, and the chipped tooth meant I spent most of my youth with a hand in front of my mouth.

That reminder of how Mum tried to give me a life that was warm and happy is now erased. My smile is identical to that of a million social media influencers.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret my new teeth at all. My mouth is now healthier, aesthetically pleasing and pain-free.

But just as you land on holiday in the bright light of the Med and realise that black jacket is stained and your knees are hairy, so I realise the rest of me doesn’t quite measure up.

Of course, there is nothing more ageing than to lose one’s teeth: the face collapses, false teeth click and then sit – a blatant reminder of age and neglect – on a bedside table.

But be careful what you wish for. Your face and body, should you opt for expensive procedures, can resemble the Forth Bridge: no sooner do you fix one bit, another cracks.

And here’s a jarring collision – Kris Jenner might look like her daughters, but does she have their energy, curiosity, drive, passion?

It’s the pressure we put on ourselves – believing the lie we must look perfect to feel happy (I’m single, which doesn’t help) – that is rotten.

Not our teeth at all.

I recently decided to try to shore up my face, living up to my teeth, by visiting a clinic just off Harley Street. The bill for a raft of treatments – Thermage skin tightening, lasers for brown spots and thread veins – would cost about £6,000. Yikes.

But, having my make-up done for yet another photoshoot, I’m given a great tip by the make-up artist: ‘You need to fly to Korea. It’s the new Turkey for face work.’

I’m sorely tempted…