BEAUTY SHOP TALK

by

Vicki Charmaine Bunch

Sometimes people ask me, "Vicki Charmaine, what is the secret of your mysterious smile?" But usually they just say, "Wipe that smart-alecky grin off your face."

A few weeks ago on NPR's All Things Considered, host Robert Siegel interviewed Martin Wainwright of The Guardian about a new theory for the Mona Lisa's smile. Forensic archaeologists working at a college in Bradford, England, speculate that the Mona Lisa looks like that because she's hiding black teeth. People used to take mercury for medicinal purposes and mercury blackens ones enamel.

Recently on The Antique Road Show an appraiser complimented the owner of two family portraits on the fact her great-great grandparents were smiling. Most portrait subjects, he said, had already lost their teeth by the time they could afford to commission a painting. Most did not smile or smiled weirdly like the Mona Lisa.

This brings to mind an argument with my mother-in-law over whether my daughter Stormy's angelic smile as she kicked and cooed in her bassinet was a manifestation of infant bliss.

"How darling. She's smiling," I recall saying. "She must be thinking, 'I have the best mommy in the world.'"

"It's just gas," said my mother-in-law.

"You mean laughing gas?" I asked, horrified that someone would administer nitrous oxide to a baby.

I was innocent then, before years of harsh exposure to the bodily functions of others took their toll. Naturally, my mother-in-law, a former vaudevillian, was referring to the simplest hydrocarbon, methane, which made her a hit with second grade boys. Methane is the type of gas cows are using to destroy the ozone layer in retaliation for centuries of being eaten. Which brings us back to teeth, the cruel weapon of the carnivore.

Troubled by the controversy surrounding the origins of smiling, I went to the library and consulted half a dozen large, heavy books, such as The Famous Book of Art, to see if I could find anybody with choppers. I quickly discovered that Jesus, for one, never showed a toothy grin.

I examined hundreds of works, like Titian's Venus and the Lute Player, featuring a totally nude lady--except for a strand of pearls--and a fully-clothed lute player. Venus, who proudly bares her pearls, conceals her pearly whites. In Botticelli's Birth of Venus (in which Venus is not a baby but a full-grown naked lady) a little man appears to be blowing on Venus. His bicuspids are nowhere to be found.

Raphael, Michelangelo, Correggio--no chompers. Renoir--whose light appears to burst from the canvas--no gleaming molars. Does the poor fellow in Edvard Munch's The Scream howl because a dentist has just pulled his teeth?

Finally I hit pay dirt. Frans Hals' Yonker Ramp and His Sweetheart (1623) features a jolly man in a big hat with a giant feather, belting out a drinking song. Both he and his sweetheart are wearing clothes. Both reveal mouths loaded with incisors. Perhaps the Dutch were the only happy people. In another painting, however, Hals' Laughing Cavalier is not laughing. He is smiling imperceptibly, like the Mona Lisa, as if he has black teeth or gas.

Only in this century, with the invention of whitening toothpaste, does one begin to see people's biters in school photos, mug shots, etc. The Mona Lisa's mystique, despite all the hoopla, can be explained by the ugly fact of poor dental hygiene. Or maybe gas.