Braces are something of a rite of passage for teenagers; many of us get a mouthful of metal in junior high in efforts to perfect our smiles, but FKA twigs is making a strong case for adult braces. And don’t worry, she’s not sitting in the orthodontist’s chair in effort to close her signature gap.
The musician posted an up close and personal look at the process, straight from the dentist’s office. “I’m not closing my gap,” she wrote in the caption to assure fans, though she didn’t elaborate as to the reason for her new set of orthodontia. Twigs’s braces aren’t the braces of my youth; there are no bright colored bands you can change out on a whim to freshen up the look, just a simple, dare-we-say chic set of silver placed in the center of her teeth.
FKA twigs has talked about her relationship with her teeth before. In July 2022, she told British Vogue that she’s learned to love them. “I have really weird, crazy teeth. When I was 20, I was going to get a full set of veneers. I got all the treatments and all the prep done, but the week before I cancelled it,” she said at the time. However, a meeting with photographer Alasdair McLellan changed her view. “Because I had such big teeth and a big gap between them, which I was really self-conscious about, I couldn’t shut my mouth properly. But he just made me forget about that. He saw something different in me, and it changed my life.”
Twigs isn’t the only celebrity to experiment with adult orthodontia. Gwen Stefani famously had braces in the late ’90s alongside her hot pink hair, while Emma Watson got a set during a break in filming the Harry Potter movies. Gabrielle Union even showed off her retainer in a cute makeup-free selfie. While we don’t know the reason behind FKA twigs’s new braces, we know she’ll be making them an integral part of her look — and perhaps setting a trend at the same time.