Celebrities such as Hailey Bieber and Kourtney Kardashian get called trendy for wearing them, while tooth jewelry has long been and may still be stigmatized when worn by Black and Latinx people. With the beauty and style industry’s track record of cultural appropriation, it’s important to recognize the roots of tooth jewelry.
And, hey, if you find someone outside of your community who's doing it, I think there's more than enough business to go around.” “As long as you're supporting people within your community, I think that's awesome. “I love seeing so many new sorts of jewelry designers, especially women Black women more specifically, that are coming into this practice, because it is very much a part of our culture, as far as who wears it,” Al-baari tells NYLON. She thinks that while educating people on the cultural context of tooth jewelry is worthwhile, so too is keeping in mind who is profiting off of it now. As gold teeth continued to rise into the spotlight after Nelly’s “Grillz” music video (which featured over 70 close-up grill shots), so too did other forms of tooth jewelry.Ĭontemporary Detroit-based grills artist Ruqayyah Alzona Al-baari learned the art in South Florida, where she found tooth jewelry a mainstream stay in predominantly Black communities prior to the trends of the moment. Modern grills can be traced back to West Indian immigrants and Black New Yorkers in the ‘70s and ’80s, with Eddie Plein credited as the inventor of the gold removable fronts. Tooth jewelry also holds cultural significance in Black style history, especially grills and caps - which have also become more popular in the past year, due in part to a new crop of grills artists including Helen Harris aka Helen with the Gold Teeth and Dolly Cohen. Similar jewelry has long been part of Latinx culture, dating back to the earliest documented examples in the Mayan Empire (they did, in fact, drill into teeth and fill the holes with precious stones). While tooth jewelry was a major part of late ‘90s and ‘00s style and is having a resurgence thanks to TikTok, tooth gems are not a recently invented trend by any means. In fact, the #toothgem hashtag has amassed over 163 million views on the app, and recent research from PolicyBee analyzing nostalgic beauty trends found tooth gems to be a frontrunner in Y2K comebacks. From grills and full-tooth gem covers to small, single-tooth charms, tooth embellishments are just one of many 2000s-era trends that are making a comeback right now. Scrolling down the TikTok For You Page over the past year, you’ve likely seen that tooth piercings (also called tooth gems) and tooth jewelry, in general, are having a major surge in popularity.
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