Americans regularly fork over $5,000 to fix a crooked smile with braces. But in Japan, women are spending about $400 for just the opposite. On the other side of the planet, imperfect teeth are becoming a thing of beauty.
Japan's beauty trend, dubbed "tseuke-yaeba," has reached a fever pitch, with young women paying hundreds for "snaggleteeth."
The procedure first made headlines in 2011, but it has grown in popularity since then, even spawning a Japanese pop girl group whose members sport the snaggletooth look. The girl group, TYB48 or "Tseuke-Yaeba 48," was created by the Taro Masuoka — the very same dentist who pioneered the procedure.
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"A lot of my patients are fashion-conscious and very cute. I wanted to find some way to take advantage of this, so I formed TYB48," Masuoka, of Tokyo's Pure Cure dental salon, told Japan Today.
The group, whose debut album titled "Mind If I Bite?" dropped last April, turned the child-like vampire mouth into a bona-fide phenomenon. But they're far from Japan's first famous females with mangled mouths. See the smiles on the country's popular news anchor Mika Sugisaki and Japan's crown princess Masako.
The trend may seems out of step with American dentistry, but in Japan—where fashion trends often take their cue from child-like physical attributes—it's a thing of beauty.
To read the entire article and see photos, visit shine.yahoo.com.
See more about the tseuke-yaeba craze in this article, in which a television personality has the procedure done on air.
