Anjali Rajpal’s office in Beverly Hills doesn’t look like your average dental clinic: the waiting room has black leather seats and abstract art, while a hefty chandelier hangs from the ceiling. Rajpal doesn’t look like your average dentist, either: she’s wearing slim-fitting black scrubs with Air Force 1 trainers and, with a smile, reveals a flash of diamonds in her mouth.
Rajpal’s clinic, Beverly Hills Dental Arts, specialises in cosmetic dental treatments and “smile makeovers”, which often entail fixing precious stones and crystals to the teeth or creating custom gold crowns. Over the past few years, she has seen an uptick in customers wanting to make their smiles literally sparkle and has high-profile clients including NBA and NFL players, musicians and models, who know her as the “Diamond Dentist”.
This interest is part of a global increase in demand for mouth jewellery — which includes removable grills, tooth gems and decorative dental caps. Euromonitor’s Fflur Roberts says younger consumers in particular are driving demand. “It’s growing across male and female demographics, as well as across income groups, given that the trend includes Swarovski crystals all the way up to full-blown diamonds and gold and custom-made products,” she says.
The rise is in part thanks to the resurgence of Y2K trends from the late 1990s and early 2000s, when grills and tooth gems hit the mainstream, and as part of a more general increase in cosmetic dentistry. And, of course, there’s celebrity influence — with Beyoncé wearing a gold-and-diamond grill by French jeweller Dolly Cohen for her Oscars after party this year, or Rihanna’s metal mouthpiece, on a recent cover of Interview magazine, by New York-based Gabby Elan. The likes of Rosalía, Lisa from Blackpink and model Adwoa Aboah have all recently sported tooth gems.
“It really is just to attract more attention to your teeth, to light up the room and sparkle whenever you smile,” adds Rajpal of the appeal of mouth jewellery. “And because I’m a dentist I’m always thinking about how to apply them so that your oral hygiene doesn’t need to change.”
The adhesive used for tooth gems is similar to the bonding material for braces, and Rajpal says that when applied correctly, they can hardly be felt. “Swarovski crystals are flat backed, so they’re easy to keep flush with the tooth. Diamonds are a little trickier, because they have a point, so often I’ll make a tiny hole in the tooth to inset them.” Tooth gems can last anywhere from a few weeks to several years. Recently, she’s been doing “more gold teeth that are cemented in like a typical crown, with diamonds or different jewels”.
Using gold and precious gems to decorate the teeth dates back to the Etruscans, who, as far back as 700BC, welded bands of gold around their incisors, and to the Mayans who filled their teeth with jade and other stones from 200AD. Modern iterations of mouth jewellery appeared in the 1980s in New York, thanks to a jeweller known as “Famous” Eddie Plein, who started adapting single dental crowns into multiple gold caps that could be taken in and out, inventing the grill as we know it today. Most of his early clients were New York rappers, including Just-Ice, Flavor Flav and Jay-Z, eternally linking mouth jewellery to hip-hop culture.
“Using gold to beautify and adorn the human body is an ancient practice that people have done for thousands of years,” says Milan and New York-based jeweller Jules Kim, whose clients include Erykah Badu, Rosalía and Megan Thee Stallion. “But in terms of the popularity of grills, they gained traction in the late ’80s [and] early ’90s in the streets of New York City.”
Kim started her jewellery brand Bijules in 2002, after working as a DJ and club promoter in New York. When she started creating mouth jewellery, she sought the help of Charlie Goldcap, another of the original grill masters who made jewellery for the Wu-Tang Clan in the 1990s and ASAP Mob in the 2000s. “He taught me everything I know: the artisanal value of making grills, because it’s a really specific process; the wax making techniques; and also how you deal with clients when you take an impression for grills, because it’s extremely intimate,” she says.
It’s often at this vulnerable stage, when Kim’s clients are in her chair, that she takes the opportunity to teach them about the history of mouth jewellery and its ties to black culture. “In Italy, I work with a lot of famous rappers who are often white people. Normally, I like to go into the story of hip-hop jewellery, about how black Americans have a more challenging experience than white Americans, and grills are a way to show that they’re thriving, as well as about the possibility of appropriation, when they have something in their mouth — when I’m doing the mould — so they have to listen,” she adds. “If you don’t understand the origin, and you can’t speak forward about the culture, then you shouldn’t be making them.”
Demand for tooth gems and grills has also increased in London’s Hatton Gardens, where Snow Vuong and Solange Garcia of Plygrnd Ldn create custom designs for musicians Central Cee, Nia Archive and ASAP Nast, as well as the actor Letitia Wright. “Our most popular designs are windows with a line of diamonds on the next tooth tip, and diamond gap-fillers, which is a line of diamonds between two teeth,” says Vuong. For tooth gem designs, the duo often get requests for diamond bezels, 18k gold letters and numbers, or popular brand motifs such as the Nike swoosh and MCM logo, “but stars and hearts still seem to be the most popular choice”.
Garcia believes that the current rise is more than a trend. “We are finally seeing a true reflection of what this style of jewellery and adornment has become. It’s conceptual art, and the world is finally catching up.” This is a sentiment shared by Los Angeles-based jeweller Ian Delucca, who has made grills for musicians J Balvin and Tyga, and has sought to refine the craft through digital technology. “It turned out that a lot of people really liked the idea of more artful, avant-garde grills,” adds Delucca, who is this year working on a project with Sotheby’s.
Similarly, Kim’s designs are being shown at the American Museum of Natural History as part of Ice Cold: An Exhibition of Hip-Hop Jewelry, which she says is a marker of grills being acknowledged in traditional cultural institutions. “It’s not just about how grills look, it’s about what they say.” She adds, too, that the popularity of mouth jewellery shows how what’s fashionable doesn’t always trickle down from the top: “Now we understand that so many of the designs and concepts that hit the luxury market come from the streets.”
