The New York Times Magazine 47beliefs about beauty standards. Both John and
Mike have spoken extensively on their theories
about the facial angles and symmetries they con-
sider most aesthetically pleasing. They do not
believe beauty is culturally determined, instead
proposing that all humans have an inborn pref-
erence for wide, forward-grown faces. A few
years ago, John hired an artist to render an
image of an ancient person with his vision of
ideal facial growth. The result was a strange
Nordic-Amazonian woman with a squat face and
high cheekbones who bore an uncanny resem-
blance to Melania Trump. In John’s view, near-
ly everyone living in industrial societies devi-
ates from this appearance, and deformity has
become so rampant as to seem normal. Beautiful
people in industrialized societies today are, to
the Mews, freakish exceptions — the lucky few
who miraculously managed to eat a hard diet
and close their mouth as children.
Over the past several years, the Mews have begun
posting videos that emphasize a new claim, which
they believe is among the most serious medical
discoveries in history: Forward facial growth,
they say, can increase the size of the upper airway,
preventing sleep apnea and its deadly secondary
aff lictions. (John says that, in recognition of his
insights, one of his followers is trying to nomi-
nate him for a Nobel Prize in Medicine.) To draw
attention to these ideas, Mike told me one day
at the clinic, they had devised a new strategy for
their YouTube channel. The videos that got them
the most viewers, he said, tended to be ones with
a focus on celebrity — an analysis of Kylie Jen-
ner’s face titled ‘‘How to Improve Cheek Bones’’
brought in a half-million views alone, and videos
on Jude Law, Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-
Jones garnered attention, as well. Some strike
an almost lurid tone. (‘‘I Might Have Destroyed a
Girl’s Face,’’ one announces.) Mike admitted that
the new direction was an eff ort to bring women to
the channel in hopes of reaching young mothers.
‘‘Use the clickbait to get people in,’’ he said, ‘‘and
then they come down the rabbit hole.’’
During my week at the clinic, the strategy
seemed to be paying off. Early one morning, a
slim woman wearing a massive shawl named Ieva
arrived in the waiting room with her 7-year-old
daughter, Greta, in tow. She’d read about the
Mews’ theories online, and now she worried that
Greta might suff er from poor facial growth, as
well as postural and breathing issues. Bouncing
on his heels, Mike ushered them into the exam
room and began to analyze the girl. He held a
piece of string in front of her face, searching for
asymmetries; he looked up her nostrils; he asked
her to open her mouth. ‘‘Mild crowding,’’ he said.
‘‘And she’s got a bit of an overjet,’’ meaning her
upper incisors stuck out.
‘‘She has nice facial form,’’ he concluded, ‘‘but
keep an eye out for her lips.’’ They were cute and
pouty now; if they grew thin, he said, it would
indicate growth gone awry.
Sitting on a bench nearby, Ieva asked why so
many people had crooked teeth and — as the Mews
claimed — long, unattractive faces. ‘‘Do you think
it’s to do with the fact that babies are given puréed
foods?’’ She worked as a breastfeeding consultant,
she said, and knew the importance of holistic
approaches to child-rearing. She added that she’d
chosen not to vaccinate her daughter, believing
that vaccine-skeptical scientists had been silenced
by a fearful establishment without a fair assessment
of their claims. (Separately and unprompted, John
once off ered me a defense of the scientist who fi rst
popularized the anti-vaccine theory, saying he’d
been defamed simply for questioning a consensus.
‘‘He’s a chap one should sympathize with rather
than castigate,’’ he said.) Mike then showed Ieva
their proprietary device, the Biobloc. It looked like
a blue retainer, but on its sides it had two ‘‘fangs,’’
which induce a ‘‘Pavlovian response,’’ he said, by
scraping patients’ gums if they hang their mouth
open. Ieva turned the device over in her hands,
frowning. Mike told her to seek the opinion of two
traditional orthodontists, though it was unlikely
they would treat a girl so young. By the time an
orthodontist was comfortable putting braces on
Greta, he said it would be too late — most of Greta’s
facial growth would be complete. ‘‘These things
rarely self-correct,’’ he warned.
Ieva took her daughter, promising to come
back. But Mike had his doubts: ‘‘I got the impres-
sion she’s not going to push her daughter because
her daughter is a little darling,’’ he told me. Peo-
ple thought he could magically fi x their jaws, he
said, but ‘‘I’m no more than a personal trainer.’’
They had to be motivated to achieve health and
beauty for themselves. If the girl didn’t comply,
Mike would know: The Biobloc device has a
data-collecting heat sensor that lets him see, on
a computer chart, how many hours his patients
spend wearing it.
This emphasis on compliance irks the Mews’
critics almost more than anything else, because
it allows them to blame their patients for any
failures, while taking credit for all successes. John
has treated dozens, if not hundreds, of people,
and frequently claims he obtained permission to
share their photos publicly. Nevertheless, he has
only ever revealed a small, self-selected sample
of the photos. The best of these before-and-after
pictures, on display in the clinic’s waiting room,
are undeniably impressive. But I wondered what
the many missing photos would show.
In the basement of the castle one day, I came
across six plastic bins: Inside were all of John’s
patient photos. He seemed surprised that they’d
turned up, and when I asked to go through them,
he refused. ‘‘What would be the point?’’ he said.
‘‘If someone doesn’t look good, I’ll just say they
didn’t comply; and if they do look good, I’ll justsay they did.’’ In ‘‘The Cause and Cure of Maloc-
clusion,’’ John writes that he lives by a personal
principle: ‘‘Try never to make a statement that
might one day be proved wrong.’’ At fi rst, I’d
taken this as a commitment to his judiciousness
of thought. But as I considered those six boxes,
the emphasis shifted to the end of the sentence —
‘‘be proved wrong’’ — and I started to understand
why a man who’s spent the majority of his very
long life promoting an untested theory might be
skittish about the idea of proof.On my last day with the Mews, I returned to the
castle by train. One of Mike’s assistants retrieved
me at the station, and we drove alongside roll-
ing, sun-drenched fi elds. In the historic village of
Mayfi eld we passed a small, cartoonishly slant-
ed Tudor cottage whose facade, it turned out,
had been restored by John Mew just a few years
before. Sunken clay roads took us deeper into the
countryside until we turned a corner and came
upon the crooked castle in its hollow.
John made us tea and as we sat on the edge
of the lake, he recounted a half-century’s worth
of feuds and the sporting feats of his youth, the
homemade catapults and jousting tournaments,
the German bombers he watched from his
bedroom window as a boy. A plump pheasant,
perched on a wooden fence up the hill, interrupt-
ed occasionally with a screech. Around a young
redwood, which the Mews lamented would one
day cast the castle in shadow, a dozen peculiar,
shaggy brown sheep grazed in the grass. ‘‘They’re
called Soay sheep,’’ John said. ‘‘The Romans
developed the woolly sheep that we have now,
and they’re a very artifi cial type of sheep. But the
Soay sheep are very much the same as they would
have been in pre-Roman times.’’
John was in a combative mood. He said he
wanted to consult with his assistant on ways
to sue the General Dental Council to have his
license reinstated. ‘‘I really think we need — for
the good of the public and for the future of ortho-
tropics — to nail them somehow,’’ he said. It was
clear he couldn’t bear not to be practicing, to be
stuck feckless in the castle posting on Facebook.
Iconoclasm, he said, always brought with it ostra-
cism — revolutionary ideas took time to catch on.
He knew that he would die without seeing his the-
ories widely accepted. But there was a historical
fi gure whose story gave him hope that one day
vindication would come. In a poem written in the
late 1700s, shortly before his death, the physician
Erasmus Darwin proposed that creatures might,
over time, change their appearance to adapt to
the world, giving rise to new species. ‘‘Everybody
thinks it was Charles Darwin who came up with
the idea of evolution,’’ John said, ‘‘but it was actu-
ally his grandfather who fi rst intuited it.’’ It took
the elder Darwin to dream up the theory — and
the younger Darwin to push it forward.
Leaving the castle that evening in the waning
springtime light, I already (Continued on Page 49)Orthotropics
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