daggerpen:

aquarian-sunchild:

daggerpen:

grandenchanterfiona:

Your DA love interest probably never brushed their teeth in their life.

Let that sink in.

Oh my god

I can’t believe it

All that obsessive research into medieval dental hygiene actually paid off

I was spending all this time thinking “Literally no one cares about Thedosian dental hygiene, Amy, why are you wasting your time on this” but HERE IT IS

So yeah, this isn’t actually true! While the toothbrush itself is a fairly modern invention, there’s a well recorded history of people in medieval Europe using a combination of various sweet-smelling mouth rinses and scrubbing their teeth clean with a cloth and a mild abrasive herb paste of some sort. Some common rinses included mint and wine or mint and vinegar, and pastes included things like marjoram and mint, rosemary and charcoal, and vinegar, pickling alum, white salt and honey.

Someone even tested a bunch of historical remedies out and found out that they were mostly pretty effective.

So rest assured, your DA makeouts are probably reasonably minty fresh!

But what about things like Queen Elizabeth’s black teeth? Is that just like, an historical outlier?

My understanding – and I’ll admit there’s some information I haven’t been able to dig up, so anyone who knows more is of course free to chime in with any additional information or corrections – is that the introduction of hugeass amounts of sugar to the British diet fucked shit up, toothwise. It rotted teeth a lot faster than standard (sugary stuff can cause serious tooth decay even with our modern dental hygiene, and while dental hygiene was definitely a thing throughout history they still did not have the options and knowledge we have), and rather than looking at this tooth rotting and trying to prevent it, people started to see black teeth as a status symbol, because it meant you could afford sugar, and people even started intentionally blackening their teeth. (A couple other cultures have had tooth blackening traditions throughout history, actually – you can check out a bit about that here, and probably find some better sources if you poke around more)