White teeth signifies health

Call it superficial or fake, clean white teeth is generally accepted as looking better than yellow teeth.  Why is this the case?  Yellow teeth is often associated with tooth decay, poverty, and bad health.  Yellow teeth is usually the product of bad hygiene or a poor diet.  There are long historical associations with these negative images. The movies are filled with images of poor peasants with rotten teeth or prisoners with bad dental hygiene.  While we like to think we live in more tolerant and nonjudgmental times, many of these negative associations still survive today.  The bias against yellow teeth, sadly, kind of makes sense because it is no longer socially acceptable to  make differentiations based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or money (somewhat), so the remaining areas for discrimination and judgment revolve around looks.  Discriminating and looking down on people with yellow or bad teeth is one of the few socially accepted ways people can discriminate and judge others.

White teeth signifies appeal

Flowing from the health aspects of appearance, clean white teeth signifies your desirability.  This applies to dating, business, networking, and other social activities.  People are normally attracted to clean clothes, skin, hair, and other features.  Why shouldn’t they consider your teeth as well?  Clean teeth, as evidenced by white teeth, reflect the other aspects of your being or your other features.  Your teeth are part of the complete package that is your persona.  It helps to make a good first impression, whether it is to make a sale, to get a deal, to make a point, or to get someone attracted to you.  While it may seem like a small detail, every little piece of the image puzzle fits in the viewer’s mind to create an impression.  Clean teeth gives a positive impression since it signifies health and therefore desirability/positivity.  Sometimes people interpret the small details as a way of reading the other persons priorities or values.

White teeth signals your character

For some people, your teeth are an indication of your character.  Every feature of your body is a reflection of your values.  What clothes you wear, how you comb your hair, what kind of glasses you wear, the color of your clothes–all these features give people insight into your values.  While it may seem superficial, your decisions about your appearance shows a lot about your priorities in life.  At the most basic, it shows if you are a clean person or an organized person.  A clean and organized person has certain values.  A dirty or disorganized person has other values.  Appearances are as shorthand for reading these values.  People do not normally say what their values are, but the way they carry themselves and their appearance speaks volumes about their character, values, and priorities.  People normally do not ask you what your values are.  People are normally shy or subtle when trying to determine your character so they use the shorthand signals from your appearance, speech, and actions to make this judgment call.

While it would be nice to judge people strictly from the content of their character and from an in-depth understanding of their beings, this is practically impossible to do in a short amount of time.  People use appearance as a way to make value judgments quickly.  Do not let this work against you, make sure to take care of small details that people pay attention to so you can be sure to make a good first impression.