Since his youth, John Mew has obsessed over what distinguishes beautiful faces from plain ones. He readily volunteers that his own face falls into the latter category — a realization that dawned on him at age 17, when he overheard a girl describe him as “the boy with the very long face.” This confirmed a thought that had struck him some time earlier, walking along a roadside in his hometown in Kent: He tended to hang his mouth open; maybe the downward pull of his facial muscles had helped narrow and lengthen his jaw . After dental school, in the 1950s, John worked as an assistant to an orthognathic surgeon, who advanced people’s jaws to improve their appearance. He told me that he would examine specimens in museums, and from this he deduced that jaw deficiencies and malocclusion — a misaligned bite — were nonexistent in the archaeological and animal records. And so he began to think about what had given rise to them, and how they might best be cured. He trawled the literature for forgotten theories on facial growth. He obtained access to cadaver skulls and analyzed them, with particular focus on what he sees as the face’s most important bone: the maxilla.
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How Two British Orthodontists Became Celebrities to Incels (Published 2020)
The Mews, a father-son team of orthodontists, have an unusual theory about the source of crooked teeth — one that has earned them a following in some of the darker corners of the internet.
