By H Khan
Hollywood actress Dakota Johnson, famous for her role in the 50 Shades of Grey Trilogy, is adored by her fans for many reasons, one being particularly unusual: Dakota’s Midline Diastema. However, recently her admirers noticed that the gap in her teeth had vanished. Surprisingly, the loss did not sit too well with the fans who began questioning the 29-yr-old Hollywood star on various social media platforms.
Earlier, Dakota Johnson had also been seen poking fun at her diastema several times, labelling it as her “only talent”. She once appeared on a Vanity Fair episode where she proudly stuck different daily items between her central maxillary incisors, toothpick and credit card being two among others. But the famous gap was now gone!
Recently the actress made an appearance on the widely watched talk show, The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, where answering the famous query became inevitable when Fallon directly and dramatically asked Dakota to explain her missing gap: “Fans are upset, everybody is brokenhearted that the gap in your teeth is not there anymore. No one knows what to say! What is going on?”
Amidst stifled laughter, Johnson tried her best to provide an explanation.
“I had permanent retainers since I was 13, it was glued to the back of my teeth. I was having a lot of neck problems recently so my orthodontist decided that it would be a good idea to take it off and see if my jaw expanded and helped me. And my gap closed by itself,” she told Fallon. I am really sad about it too, she added jokingly.
When Fallon appeared flabbergasted, Johnson tried to further break things down for him and the audience: "As you grow as a human being, your skull expands and your jaw and your teeth move," she said. "Your teeth don't look like they did when you were a baby."
Okay! So to better understand the real medical and dental reasoning behind Johnson’s tragic loss, Dental News approached an expert on the matter.
As it turns out the retainers were fixed at an early age and then left in the mouth for too long, which might have interfered with the normal growth of the jaw, therefore, causing the said problems. Once removed, the chained teeth naturally moved to adjust in a more comfortable place and position. Though we have learnt from studies over time that in the majority of cases, there were no long-term hostile effects on patients with fixed retainers.
