Keep your hands off my smile

"Your smile is more than just an expression, but also its your representation to the world. If you want to make a great first and lasting impression on others, a great smile is essential. But keeping your smile great takes a lot of work. More than just brushing and flossing, maintaining a healthy mouth requires regular visits to the dentist. David Brisman has been keeping Manhattan's smiles healthy and bright for more than three generations."

What presumptuous rot. That's from my dentist's online brochure. It's hard to know what I resent more, the reduction of my phsyical health to so bone-headed a metric — what's it got to do with him how often I smile? — or the fact that I am now forced not just to smile to express myself, but because my smile is my "representation to the world." Come again? Unless I smile my Dr Brisman-enhanced smile, I will not make "a lasting impression on others"? What a hideous threat is contained in that phrase, with its vision of the poor unsmiling wretches of the world shunted aside by the Brismanned multitude as they march forward, teeth flashing in the sun, supremely confident of the lasting impressions they are all making on one another. I'll be over here sucking on a lemon drop thank you very much.

Actually, Dr Brisman is a nice guy: down to earth, unpretentious, funny. Which just goes to show what lengths of distortion — how unlike a human being people they are prepared to sound — in the name of advertising.