Teeth LEDs

Today teenage girls go to the tattoo shop together with their moms. If you get a tattoo today, it just means you want to be like everyone else.

This has had the unintended side effect of prisoners having to tattoo their faces to show they are harder edged folks then your average teen. And this in turn makes it harder form them to a get a job once they are out of prison, because previously you could just wear long sleeves and that would do the job most of the time.

Also back in the day if you had tattoos, with nothing else, a lot of people would actually think better not mess with that dude. Today, it means nothing.

But according to my anthropology professor, most civilizations thought the ages. had body modifications well beyond what we're doing today.

My theory is that Japanese people are rich enough to count as white and rare enough in the NYT newsroom to count as Republican, which makes this OK by their lights. If the published an article on hip hop teeth as a craze sweeping the nation, they'd lose face with people they actually care about.

Grills are an ostentatious display of wealth. Ostentatious displays of wealth are severely frowned upon in any culture (or subculture) where wealth is actually common. White people, or Japanese people, or even middle-class black people, would never wear something as tacky as a diamond-studded tooth grill... they'd rather display their wealth via something like a $20,000 watch that only folks with $20,000 watches know is a $20,000 watch.

Now, LEDs aren't expensive, so they don't work as ostentatious displays of wealth. About the only thing they work as is an ostentatious display of your willingness to adopt trends in the full knowledge that they're completely stupid-looking. And that kind of thing may play well in Japan but it won't fly in the west where we're not quite so ironically detached.