Braces

Did you have braces? Of course you did. Were you one of those awful kids who changed their elastics to correspond with the seasons/holidays? Do you currently have a built-in retainer on the inside of your teeth (or, the “tongue side of your teeth,” as the Invisalign posters put it, mind-expandingly) that makes you wonder, every so often, what will become of it when they cremate you?

In the current issue of Mental Floss, via Neatorama, they’re talking orthodontic facts, like the fact that some braces these days “are embedded with microelectronic chip[s] to measure the movement of each tooth and reduce the amount of time teenagers spend under the wire,” (madness) and that for the past decade or so in Thailand braces have been so popular among teen girls that black-market vanity orthodontics are sometimes applied with super glue. Oh noo!