I think now no chest hair is in…
No chest hair and yes pec implants.
No, serious: apparently moobs are ok so long as they’re silicon or due to steroid use.
I think this may well be at the heart of it.
Sereally?
A friend of mine works in dentistry and says British teeth are better and healthier than American teeth, by and large. American dentistry that focusses on eggshell white straight teeth ends up scraping away all the protective enamel, leaving just the root.
The British have the healthiest teeth in the world by some measures.
A man with straightened, artificially whitened teeth like those seen in Holywood would be seen as being extremely effeminate in the UK.
Japanese have found crooked teeth in women to be “cute.” When I was first in Japan in the early 80s, there was a popular singer, Naoko Kawai with crooked teeth. I asked friends at the time why she wouldn’t straighten her tooth, and the friends said yaeba (crooked teeth) was “cute.”
In the mid 80s to the mid 90s, the popularity of yaeba declined, but it’s gaining polulatiry again..
One singer who used to have yaeba and then had them straightened in the mid 80s is Mako Ishino. Here is how she looked then and now
Even now, a lot of women don’t like yaeba, and have them straightened.
Why who did what? Mike Myers is an actor - it’s his job to appear in movies.
I don’t have a postable cite since my sources were on paper, but butt and chest implants apparently are relatively frequent for male patients of cosmetic surgery.
Methinks they’re nuts, but then, I don’t understand a woman getting chest implants unless she’s undergone a mastectomy, either.
(likes chest hair, does not like large pecs)
I used to live in the UK, I had to go to the dentist (this would have been in the 70s) it was the single most terrifying, and painful, experience ever. The drill was deafeningly loud and the painkiller injection hurt like hell, and was completely ineffective. It was like something out of a cheap horror movie, you were sitting on a reclined chair, with a blinding light in your eyes, hands would appear bearing sharp objects that were jammed into your mouth and your screams were ignored.
I know for a fact that I am not the only person to have been [mentally] scarred for life by a visit to the dentist, and not just that specific dentist. They were all like that!!!
I have a friend in England who is so scared of the dentist, she has to be under anaesthetic for just a check-up, and someone has to be in the room with her as she can and has kicked out at the dentist (even while she’s “out”)
I have met many people in their 40s and 50s who have horrendously bad teeth, but won’t go to the dentist because they are too scared to.
goes to happy place
That’s not unique to the UK. There are dentists in the US who give people various levels of drugs to deal with the anxiety of getting a check-up or cleaning. It’s often called “sedation dentistry”. A sedation dentistry place was one of the sponsors that dropped Rush Limbaugh recently.
The more I reflect on this the more the view firms up that ‘Hollywood teeth’ speaks very clearly to that persons self-esteem. It’s a bit desperate.
As someone who grew up in Japan, I can testify that the Japanese simply aren’t obsessed with perfect teeth the way Americans are. And as a consequence, they don’t bother with orthodontics unless the teeth are bad enough to affect one’s ability to eat. I don’t recall anyone I knew in school who wore braces.
A fair few kids get their teeth straightened these days, but we mostly don’t get 'em whitened.
Wearing braces to straighten teeth was common when I was a young teenager (UK in the early 80s) but it wasn’t something everyone did. My dentist suggested braces to fix some pretty minor irregularity and I turned him down as it would’ve affected my pulling power. Hey! I was 15!
Ok, which is it? Either it’s not true that crooked teeth are more common in the UK or you like 'em that way. Can’t be both, really.
When I was in Kenya, I noticed that Kenyans have, by and large, gorgeous teeth. Straight, white, beautiful. For obvious reasons, this is not a country “obsessed with Hollywood teeth.” I asked my dentist about it, and his answer was that since Kenyans tend to marry within their ethnic group, tooth size and jaw size match, resulting in straight teeth. Don’t know why they were so white. 
Seeing as the UK has a long history of different ethnic groups, might that explain some of the orthodontic problems? Then the other factors such as the cosmetic aspect not being important to the NHS, etc, play their part in not straightening teeth. The flip side, of course, is that orthodontia is big business here, straight teeth are pushed as the norm. Who is advertising dentistry in the UK?
(I can’t hear you, I’m in my happy place!!)
It should be noted that the same polling firm determined that Armenians have the least body hair and elderly Korean women are the world’s best drivers.
The question that should be being asked is “Why do Americans think that it is necessary or normal to spend hundreds of dollars to have their children fitted with ugly and uncomfortable metal braces or headgear, often during the stage of life when they are most likely to be severely embarrassed and even psychologically scarred by such things, just so that they may have a better chance of having unnaturally straight teeth later in life?”
(A related question is “Why do Americans believe that a woman’s (but not a man’s) natural armpit hair is utterly disgusting, and that all right thinking people must surely agree?”)
The Mayans, I believe, used to strap their babies heads to boards in order that the back of the skull should be flat, which they thought somehow to be “right” or beautiful. (Ewww, curved back of the head!) Human cultures are weird. On this point, however, it is the Americans, not teh British or Japanese who are being weird.
One point about the Japanese, though: if (big if) it is true that their teeth tend to be unhealthy (as opposed to showing normal levels of coloration and crookedness), it might have something to do with the unusually low levels of calcium in the typical Japanese diet (high in seafood and low in dairy).
Actually, though, I do not ever recall hearing Americans stereotyping of the Japanese as having bad teeth, although I have heard the one about the English plenty of times (initially, indeed, from Mike Meyers, in his SNL days - I remember because I was really quite offended).