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who had reached out to him. During the days I spent with
him at the offi ce, a few of these men, all of them in their
20s or early 30s, came through. Most claimed ignorance of
the incel forums, but occasionally their language betrayed
familiarity with some of those communities’ fi xations. Many
mentioned, only half in jest, that they’d been ‘‘red pilled’’ by
the Mews. Nick, a 29-year-old mechanical engineering doc-
toral student from Greece with an oval face framed by slick
black hair, believed men split themselves into two camps
early in life: muscular, strong-jawed athletic boys who dom-
inate social life; and studious boys whose late nights in the
library leave them with hunchbacks and weak jawlines. He
said he fell into the latter camp, but didn’t think he belonged
there. ‘‘You give the impression you’re submissive,’’ he told
me, ‘‘which I’m not.’’
Nick blamed his childhood orthodontist for his predica-
ment. At age 13, after having his teeth pulled and braces put
on, he noticed with horror that his face was changing. He
asked to have the braces removed, but the orthodontist and
his parents said it was all in his head. He now believes his
braces forced him to mouth-breathe, narrowing his upper jaw
and contributing to his sallow appearance and recessed chin.
After seeing the Mews’ YouTube videos in 2016, he
reached out to Mike, who invited him in for an evaluation.
‘‘He said, ‘Let’s see if you do have those problems you think
you have, or if it’s just in your mind,’ ’’ Nick recalled. As Mike
analyzed his face, Nick said, ‘‘I was fascinated — he was
telling me things that years earlier I had told my parents.’’
Nick faulted mainstream orthodontists for just ‘‘memoriz-
ing answers from a book’’; the Mews, by contrast, off ered
a radical skepticism of received wisdom — and absolute
clarity in their explanations. ‘‘There are no hidden meanings
or complicated alchemies that people are hiding from us.’’
By the time I met him he’d been in treatment for almost
two years, and looking at his progress photos, I saw no
diff erences. When I asked Mike to point out what he saw,
he gestured vaguely at Nick’s cheeks and said, ‘‘It’s subtle.’’
After Nick left, Mike and I crossed the road for lunch at
a pub. Without looking at the menu, Mike said he already
knew what he was getting: ‘‘The creamy risotto.’’ I won-
dered if I should order a chewier dish, but realized there
was probably no point: As Mike had explained, his mas-
sive jaws were a product of childhood chewing; hard foods
couldn’t do much for the jaws of a grown adult. I settled
on the shepherd’s pie, and when our meals came — each a
porridgelike pile of mush — I noticed that we both reached
for our spoons instead of our forks.
As we ate, Mike launched into a rhapsody about the
stardom orthotropics was bringing him. He was headed
to California soon, and hoped to have an audience with
Joe Rogan. He worried that some orthodontists in America
were trying to supplant him. He marveled at the bizarre
fervor of his fans. The praise streaming in from around the
world had given him the confi dence to speak openly about
long-held ambitions. He saw himself as an heir to the great
scientifi c innovators of the past, none of whom he held in
higher esteem than Charles Darwin. As we went to pay the
bill, he handed me a two-pound coin he’d been keeping
in his wallet. Turning it over, I saw that the portrait on the
back depicted Darwin, in profi le, staring into the eyes ofplayed a powerful part in achieving orthodon-
tic ‘‘balance.’’ But other orthodontists saw it
diff erently, believing that the most they could
do was extract teeth and then straighten the
smile. The debate largely ended in the 1930s,
when clinicians began inventing the fi rst
cheap, reliable braces — methods of aligning
the teeth that were so eff ective they induced
a kind of awe in British and American practi-
tioners, and mostly sidelined the proponents
of facial-growth orthodontics.
In the rush to fi x people’s smiles, however,
troublesome facts about straightening teeth
were minimized or ignored — most signifi cant,
orthodontia’s astounding rate of relapse. From
the early 1960s to the early 2000s, researchers at
the University of Washington collected records
from more than 800 patients who’d had their
teeth straightened to see how they had fared.
Orthodontists had long assumed that patients’
teeth shifted slightly but then ‘‘stabilized’’ after
the braces came off. But the University of Wash-
ington researchers were shocked to fi nd that
fully two-thirds of patients’ teeth went crooked
again after treatment. When I asked Robert Lit-
tle, a co-author on those studies, why so many
people relapsed, he said orthodontists didn’t
fully know. ‘‘All we know is it’s happening.’’
In the Mews’ eyes, the failure to identify the
causes of relapse proves that orthodontists
fundamentally do not understand the nature
of malocclusion.
Unsurprisingly, the orthodontists I spoke to
defended their profession against the Mews’
claims. But a few experts granted that the
Mews might be getting certain things right.
Mani Alikhani, a lecturer at the Harvard School
of Dental Medicine and an advocate for scien-
tifi cally backed orthodontics, noted that issues
like rampant relapse rightly sapped credibility
from mainstream clinicians. While he thought
the Mews’ views were oversimplifi ed, he cred-
ited them and their followers with something
he considered valuable: calling attention to the
role of the lips, tongue and cheeks in shap-
ing the facial bones, which he said had gone
understudied. Timothy G. Bromage, an expert
on the biology of human facial development at
N.Y.U. College of Dentistry, told me that, in his
experience, most orthodontists’ education in
the science of jaw growth is ‘‘woefully incom-
plete.’’ During growth, ‘‘the lower jaw follows
the upper jaw,’’ Bromage said, so John Mew’s
focus on the maxilla made sense.
When the Mews point to high relapse rates
and certain other orthodontic shortcomings —
like the way braces can damage dental roots
— they stand on solid ground. But they are
also quick to step onto much shakier territo-
ry, particularly in theira chimpanzee. Mike took it back
and put it away, saying, reverent-
ly, that he couldn’t bring himself
to spend it.When I spoke to traditional
orthodontists about the Mews’
claims, they were universally
annoyed that these ideas were
catching on with the public.
Some were scandalized that John,
who is not an academic, signs his
correspondence with the title
‘‘professor’’ — an honorifi c he has
claimed since holding a two-year
visiting professorship at a uni-
versity in Romania. (He has also
identifi ed himself as ‘‘the clinical
director of the London School of
Facial Orthotropics’’; the school’s
campus comprises a bare confer-
ence room on the second fl oor
of the Purley clinic.) The ortho-
dontists stressed that no one had
ever conducted a credible study
of orthotropics, and so all of the
Mews’ claims of its effi cacy were
unproved. They pointed to stud-
ies that they said showed that
treating patients young does not
lead to better outcomes. They
laughed at John’s obsession with
the tongue and the maxilla. But
they also admitted, cautiously,
that the fi eld hadn’t properly
answered important questions,
leaving space for the Mews’ con-
trarian theories to gain purchase
among people who’d found tra-
ditional treatment unsatisfying.
In the early days of orthodon-
tics, debate raged over what the
focus of the fi eld should be. Some
practitioners aimed simply to
straighten the teeth, while others
argued that orthodontists should
look beyond the mouth and try
to shape the face as a whole. In
1900, Edward Angle, the father
of modern orthodontics, drew
a connection between maloc-
clusion and good looks: ‘‘One of
the evil eff ects of malocclusion is
the marring or distorting of the
normal facial lines,’’ he wrote,
describing the ‘‘vacant look’’
and ‘‘undeveloped nose and
adjacent region of the face’’ he
saw in many patients. The tongue
and cheeks, Angle hypothesized,27(Continued on Page 47)