Agate Credit Only by Name SurnameJohn Mew is a 91-year-old orthodontist from the United
Kingdom. His face is long and narrow; his hazel eyes rest
in deep sockets. Atop his head he wears a yellowing toupee,
its presence betrayed by a fringe of talcum-white hair pok-
ing out at his ears. In his youth, Mew navigated the British
Isles as a competitive sailor, raced Formula One cars and
modeled period costumes for the BBC; now he walks with
a cane, but he’s still vigorous. He lives alone in a castle of
his own making, which sits upon a man-made lake in a
secluded forest in southeast England. When I visited him
there last March, he ushered me across a reedy moat and
into the kitchen. Walking through the home, which he built
in the 1990s, we passed by a medieval drawing room with
intentionally slanted walls and climbed staircases in a turret,
whose stone steps Mew had sanded down unevenly in hopes
of lending them the appearance of age. In a dining room he
called the Great Hall, grotesques protruded from oak beams
near the ceiling — all of them carved by Mew himself. He
pointed out to me that the earliest carvings tended to have
lopsided faces while the latter ones did not, as he’d refi ned
his technique on the fl y. ‘‘It’s all part of the ambience,’’ he
told me, grinning. ‘‘Why do crooked things look better?’’
But if crookedness lends a castle its beauty, it does the
opposite to a face — and nothing concerns Mew more than
the proliferation of ugly faces, which he considers a mod-
ern epidemic. For the past 50 years, he has championed an
unorthodox cure, based on a theory about the cause and
treatment of crooked teeth, which he calls ‘‘orthotropics.’’
If correct, Mew’s theory would upend many of the funda-
mental beliefs of mainstream orthodontic practice.
Traditional orthodontic teaching explains crooked teeth
mostly through genetics: We inherit the alignment of our
bite from our parents, just as we inherit almost any other
trait. Mew does not believe this. Instead, he sees crooked
teeth as a symptom of a sweeping, unrecognized health cri-
sis. Changes in our lifestyle and environment since the 18th
century, Mew contends, are inducing our jaws to grow small
and recessed. The teeth do their best to come in straight,
but our misformed faces cause them to twist and turn and
compete for space. As a result, we’ve been robbed not only
of tidy smiles but also, Mew says, of the well-defi ned faces
that were the birthright of our ancient ancestors, and which
Mew regards as the mark of true beauty.
Since the late 1970s, Mew — later joined by his 51-year-old
son and fellow orthodontist, Mike — has treated patients
in his practice in the London suburbs. Using nothing more
than palatal expanders, dietary changes, the force of the
tongue and an appliance the family invented called the Bio-
bloc, the Mews claim that they can counteract the eff ects of
modernity while children are still growing. Where tradition-
al orthodontists focus most of their eff orts on straightening
teeth, Mew says his aim is to ‘‘save the face.’’
The Mews have enraged the orthodontic community
with the caustic, uncompromising way they’ve promoted
their theories. They and the coterie of nontraditional practi-
tioners who follow them often occupy the furthest reaches of
the orthodontic fringe, written off for decades as a small but
troublesome band of cranks and kooks. They almost never
speak at mainstream conferences. Their papers, if they pub-
lish them, tend to appear in obscure, fourth-rate journals orprofi t-driven industry magazines.
British and American orthodontic
researchers told me that nearly
every claim the Mews have put
forth is wrong. Kevin O’Brien, a
leading academic orthodontist in
the U.K., described their work to
me as ‘‘mostly discredited.’’ When
I mentioned Mew to a prominent
American orthodontist, he cut me
off. ‘‘John Mew is an idiot,’’ he
said. ‘‘A total idiot.’’
To the orthodontic commu-
nity’s frustration, however, the
Mews’ beliefs have begun fi lter-
ing into the public consciousness.
Exiled from academia, John and
Mike have taken to spreading
orthotropics online, particularly
on their YouTube channel. In the
process, they’ve become popular
among incels, the ‘‘involuntary
celibate’’ young men who congre-
gate online and who explain their
lack of romantic success through
a toxic and misogynistic ideolo-
gy. As the incels touted the Mews,
elements of the alt-right joined in,
all of them sharing theories about
idealized male beauty that close-
ly overlap with the Mews’ own.
In 2018, after years in obscurity,
orthotropics (rebranded by incels
as ‘‘mewing’’) leapt into the main-
stream, the subject of discussion
on alternative-health forums and
beauty vlogs. Mike and John’s
YouTube videos have now drawn
in millions of viewers, a substantial
percentage of them young women.
In virality, the Mews have lost
some control of their idea. On
YouTube, vloggers with hundreds
of thousands of followers have
promoted orthotropics — a ther-
apy intended only for young chil-
dren — as a beauty treatment for
adults. The Mews have responded
not by telling their newfound fans
they’re wasting their time, but by
beginning to treat a select group
of adult patients to ‘‘see what’s
possible,’’ as Mike told me.
Despite the scientifically
uncharted nature of this endeav-
or, neither had much doubt about
the likelihood of success. As John
swore the fi rst time he and I spoke,
‘‘Every single face treated with
orthotropics will be good-looking.’’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 confi rmed 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 bones. 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 defi ciencies
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 for-
gotten 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.
We tend to talk about the ‘‘jaw’’ in the singu-
lar; the image in our mind is of the lower jaw —
the mandible — and it’s not hard to understand
why. The mandible is the face’s mobile bone,
opening and closing whenever we chew, speak,
yawn, sing. By contrast, we see the upper jaw
— the maxilla — as a fi xed part of the skull that
simply holds the upper teeth. But the maxilla is
actually a separate bone of its own. And in our
earliest years of life, the maxilla is hardly more
connected to the skull than any other facial bone
— a fact upon which Mew became fi xated.
He came to believe that nearly all maloc-
clusions, even the most severe overbites, were
an illusion — the main defi ciency lay not in the
mandible, as the orthodontists attested, but in
the maxilla. ‘‘The orthodontists assumed that,
because the mandible looks like it’s back, then
the maxilla must be in the correct position,’’ Mew
told me. But the jaws grow as a pair, their relative
positions partly determined by the placement
of the upper teeth. Any defi ciency in the lower
jaw, Mew believes, is actually a side-eff ect of
a less obvious defi ciency in the upper jaw. In
Mew’s telling, this is how modern faces begin
to degrade. If the maxilla doesn’t grow forward
or wide enough, the mandible adjusts backward
and down, so that the chin recedes and the face
appears to lengthen. An undersize maxilla will
not push the cheekbones to full prominence,
according to Mew, and bags may crop up under
the eyes; the cartilage of the nose, lacking sup-
port, may hinge downward on the nasal bone,
making the nose seem large and ‘‘hooked.’’ Over24