In Defence of the Gap

There is a small gap between my subject's two front teeth and she has spent the entire session trying to hide it. She is beautiful, and the gap is part of why, and she does not believe me. This happens often enough that I have developed a whole quiet speech about it, which I will put down here in the hope it reaches someone mid-hiding.

A short history of the charming gap

The technical word for a gap between teeth is a diastema, most familiar as the space between the two upper front teeth. It is common, it is ordinary, and depending on where and when you were born, it has been read as anything from a flaw to a blessing. In several cultures a front gap has been considered lucky, a sign of warmth, fortune, or good things to come, something to be pleased about rather than corrected. Fashion has adored it in waves. A steady parade of much-photographed faces, models and musicians and actors, have kept their gaps precisely because those gaps made their faces unforgettable, and their agents, to their credit, talked them out of closing them.

That is the crucial point about a gap. It is a distinguishing mark. In a world where the fashionable smile has become uniform, white and even and interchangeable, a gap is the opposite of anonymous. It belongs to one face. It is the thing a caricaturist would draw and a friend would recognise from across a station.

Why it works, aesthetically

A face made entirely of correct, even features can be handsome and forgettable at the same time. What we actually remember, and often what we find most attractive, is the point of interest, the feature that breaks the pattern just enough to hold the eye. A gap does this honestly and without effort. It adds a note of youth and mischief, a slight openness, a signature. It is the smile equivalent of a freckle or a streak of grey or a slightly crooked nose on an otherwise ordinary face, the small break that turns a pleasant face into a particular one. I have written before about how character beats correctness in a smile, and the gap is the clearest example I know. Think of how quickly you can picture the gap-toothed smiles of the people famous for them. The gap is doing the remembering for you.

Perfect is easy to admire and easy to forget. The small imperfection is what the memory holds onto.

The honest other side

None of this means everyone should keep their gap, and I would be a poor guide if I pretended otherwise. Plenty of people simply do not like theirs, and that dislike is real and does not need anyone's permission to be valid. If a gap genuinely bothers you, if you find yourself hiding it in every photo and it is quietly costing you, then closing it can be the right call, and the relief people feel afterwards is real too. Liking or disliking a feature of your own face is allowed to be personal and even a little irrational. The mistake is not choosing to change a gap. The mistake is changing it because an algorithm's idea of a perfect smile made you feel your own was wrong.

There is also a practical layer that sits underneath the aesthetics, and this is the part where I hand you firmly to a professional. Most gaps are simply the way a mouth is shaped and are no cause for concern at all. But a gap can occasionally point to something worth checking, a matter of alignment, gum health, or the way teeth meet when you bite, and a gap that is new or widening in adulthood is worth a dentist's attention rather than a blog's. A gap itself is not a defect. It is just not something to diagnose in a mirror. The American Dental Association and the NHS both keep level-headed, non-commercial information on spacing and orthodontics if you want to understand the health side before you weigh the looks.

Whose call it is

So here is the speech, condensed. Your gap is a feature, not a fault, and a great many people will find it one of the best things about your face, whatever you currently believe. If you love it, or could learn to, keep it with your whole chest and stop apologising to cameras. If you truly dislike it, after honest thought rather than borrowed insecurity, then changing it is a perfectly good choice and no one gets a vote but you. What I would hate is for you to erase a signature because a template told you to, and then miss it. I have met a few people who did exactly that, closed a gap they were talked into disliking, and quietly grieved a small piece of their own face afterwards. Not everyone regrets it, but enough do that I always ask people to sit with the decision for a while.

Confidence, in the end, does more for a gap than closing it ever could, because a gap shown freely reads as charm and a gap hidden reads as worry. That is the same lesson I keep arriving at from every direction, and I put it plainly in my note on the confidence in a smile. If you are curious how the shape and character of teeth suit different faces more broadly, I wrote about tooth shape and your face as well. Whatever you decide, decide it as yourself, for yourself, and let the camera meet you already on your side.