Ryan Lochte’s diamond teeth nearly cost him an Olympic gold medal. From Kanye West to Lana Del Rey, see stars with heavy-metal smiles.
Is wearing diamonds on your teeth worth losing gold around your neck? Not to Ryan Lochte. After winning the 400-meter individual medley at the London Olympics this weekend, the American swimmer was warned that if he wore his custom-made stars-and-stripes grill on the podium, he would not receive his medal. Rather than risk angering the IOC, Lochte waited until after the ceremony ended to sport his metallic mouthpiece and smile for the cameras.
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Long before he had an accident in 2009 that cost him several teeth, T-Pain was renowned for his flashy grills. But several days after flipping a golf cart, the rapper joked about his fractured smile with a concert audience. "My ass is on fire right now. My side hurt, my mouth hurt," Pain said of his pain. “I'd show you the marks, but I don't wanna pull my pants down right now....I got my teeth fixed the same day. Rich n---a teeth.”
To walk the runway in Kimora Lee Simmons’s Baby Phat collection for spring/summer 2007, model Miranda Kerr wore a fierce jewel-encrusted grill across her teeth. And last year, Kerr had a different kind of dental issue—Flynn, her infant son with actor Orlando Bloom, was working out his teething issues with the help of the miracle toy known as Sophie the Giraffe.
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Nelly was so fond of his precious metal mouth that he wrote a song about his many mouthpieces in 2005. As he sang proudly in “Grillz”: “Got 30 down at the bottom / 30 mo at the top / All invisible set in little ice cube blocks / If I could call it a drink, call it a smile on da rocks / If I could call out a price, let's say I call out a lot / I got like platinum and white gold, traditional gold / I'm changin grillz errday, like Jay change clothes.”
Weeks after her disastrous performance on Saturday Night Live this year, singer Lana Del Rey was all smiles while performing in Los Angeles and showed off her new capped canine. According to Us Weekly, the sparkly tooth was just temporary—a dental fashion accessory much like the one Ke$ha wears.
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When Kanye West flashed his diamond smile on Ellen DeGeneres’s talk show in October 2010, she was incredulous. “It’s not a grill?” DeGeneres asked. “'It's really my real teeth,” West explained. “I replaced my bottom row of teeth….I just thought that diamonds were cooler.” He was equally nonchalant about the permanent procedure when Vanity Fair asked about his multi-carat smile the next month: “I just like diamond teeth and I didn’t feel like having to take them out all the time.”
After undergoing dental surgery in January 2010, Hulk Hogan joked with TMZ, “Theme for the day is ... kids, take care of your teeth." Perhaps that’s one reason why his daughter, Brooke Hogan, wore a diamond grill on the red carpet for the 2006 Teen Choice Awards. Or maybe it was just to have some privacy? As she sang in her 2006 song “About Us”: “I'm just trying to live, but you're all up in my grill / How's a girl to breathe with the media / Staring down my mouth with a four-inch lens? / I just wanna hit the mall with some of my friends.”
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In the early 1980s, Flava Flav was one of the first rappers to opt for a heavy metal mouth courtesy of Eddie Plein, the godfather of gold grills. “By 2000, 2001, I started noticing jewelers come out of the woodwork, trying to do gold,” Plein said in a 2006 interview. “Right now, it’s flooded. Things have changed. The last couple years have been about the ‘ice age’, you know what I’m sayin’? Everybody wants ice. And I’m kinda tired of it a little bit. But I put the teeth into hip-hop, you know what I mean?”
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Was there ever a more famous set of metal movie chompers than Richard Kiel’s in The Spy Who Loved Me? As Jaws, Kiel’s Bond villain went after 007 with gleaming gums, but he paid a heavy price for his art. "They were nauseating," Kiel told theGuardian in 2009. "They were up in the roof of your mouth and gave you a gagging effect—you felt like you were going to be sick. It did add to the stoic part of my character—to keep from throwing up." That unpleasant side effect, however, didn’t stop Kiel from reprising the role—two years later, he returned as the grin reaper in Moonraker.
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