Fashion: white teeth — or black?

In Henry the VIII’s time, sugar became widely available in England. Those who could afford it used it on just about everything, and too much sugar causes one’s teeth to become black. But sugar was still expensive, so having black teeth came to be a symbol of wealth. Soon many of the English, women especially, were deliberately blackening their teeth as a fashion and status symbol.

To which I juxtapose today’s fashion of hyper-white teeth. (I vote for white — does that make me a culture-bound cretin?) I also wonder why yellow teeth never became fashionable when smoking was trendy. And it reminds me of an earlier post on Adam Smith and slaves to fashion:

“Some of the savage nations in North America tie four boards round the heads of their children, and thus squeeze them, while the bones are tender and gristly, into a form that is almost perfectly square. Europeans are astonished at the absurd barbarity of this practice, to which some missionaries have imputed the singular stupidity of those nations among whom it prevails. But when they condemn those savages, they do not reflect that the ladies in Europe had, till within the very few years, been endeavouring for near a century to squeeze the beautiful roundness of their natural shape into a square form of the same kind.” (From Smith’s 1759 The Theory of Moral Sentiments, IV.1, p. 326.)