My Grillz Helped Me Finally Understand a Part of My Diasporic Heritage

Your mouth is having a moment. From the rise of high-tech, stylish flossing routines and statement grillz to the backlash against veneers, oral care is no longer limited to the dentist’s chair. It’s part wellness practice and part personal style. In Marie Claire’s first-ever Teeth Week, we’re exploring why dentistry feels cooler—and more culturally loaded—than ever.

After years of back and forth, I finally bit the bullet and got grillz. Being raised in a religion where jewelry was prohibited—Seventh Day Adventists, please rise—meant that my introduction to ornamentation was limited. Still, I was always fascinated by the way the people around me wore their pieces. From necklaces to rings and even anklets, seeing stacks of gold decorating someone’s body always felt like a bold declaration of sensuality, confidence, and agency. It was a self-assuredness that my pre-teen self couldn’t wait to have one day.

That day arrived a few weeks ago, when I sat in the middle of Manhattan's Flatiron District on an overcast morning designing my first pair of grillz. Leading up to the decision, I’d been on a years-long journey of self-discovery, kick-started by a mental health episode a few years ago. Through therapy, I learned that I wasn’t doing the best job of recognizing my wins, and I set out to do something just for me. What better way than with custom jewelry?

I’m far from the only one who’s had that thought. From artists like Shaboozey, who wore a turquoise and diamond-encrusted pair to the Met Gala, to juggernauts like Beyoncé, who has flashed them in music videos and in her famous Instagram photo dumps, some of the most creative minds of this generation have made grillz a part of their artistic identities, only adding to the cool factor that the pieces already possess.

But for all their visibility, they still carry a surprising amount of baggage. It didn’t take long for me to find it on social media: a young woman whose father called her grillz “ghetto;” a retail worker who had to explain to her white customers that the grillz she makes aren’t “weird” or “quirky,” but cultural; algorithm-served suggestions for “non-ghetto” grillz. The criticism felt familiar in a way I couldn’t immediately name. The deeper I looked, the more I understood why.

I was born in Jamaica, and for Caribbean immigrants like me, grillz connect to something much older than a trend. They’re an inheritance that stretches across the Black diaspora, and connects us directly to the traditions our families carried with them when they came to this country. So what started as a personal celebration became something bigger: a journey into where grillz come from, who they belong to, and why they still aren’t given the respect they deserve.

The tradition of Black women adorning themselves with intention has a long history, and journalist and media personality Blake Newby carries that history with her every day, she tells me. “I was raised in Houston, so when I was growing up, grillz were everywhere." Newby, who got her first set two years ago, says grillz are an extension of her love of jewelry. She traces it back to her family roots in Detroit—a city steeped in its own hair and beauty culture—as well as her upbringing in the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), a Black Pentecostal denomination known for its striking presentation culture.

“When you look up COGIC Easter, you’ll see Black women wearing massive hats, brightly-colored skirt suits, and proper pantyhose,” Newby says. “My grandmother was one of those women.” For her grandmother, that attention to how you present and express yourself had always extended to jewelry. She “believed that a lady always had earrings in...those are the beliefs about ornamentation that I've had instilled into me.” Jewelry and accessories, she tells me, “are one of the many ways we as a people have made something out of nothing. Especially in a country where so much of the way we look has not only been policed, but also outright taken from us.”

She’s right. Long before today’s C.R.O.W.N. Act—a legislative framework intended to prevent race-based hair discrimination that is still struggling to get passed on a federal level—there were the Tignon Laws of 1786. Looking for ways to differentiate freed Black women from the rest of society, deter interracial marriage, and curb the accumulation of wealth and power in the Black community, New Orleans’s governor, Esteban Rodríguez Miró, signed the law into rule. It forced Black women to wear tignons, the head wraps that enslaved women wore while being forced to labor in the fields.

The women of the time, of course, met this absurdity with style: decorating their headwraps with jewels, feathers, and other accessories, turning an oppressive mandate into yet another way to beautifully adorn themselves. It was their way of asserting agency in a society that was doing everything in its power to strip it away. “No matter how we were forced to look or act, something that Black people across the diaspora have always maintained is our ability to make something with nothing,” Newby says. “Grillz, and our love for accessories at large, are such a great example of this spirit.”

Back in Flatiron, my jeweler Nathaniel McPherson—who is Guyanese—was tracing that history back even further. “I’ve had family members who have had gold teeth all my life, but it wasn’t for fashion or aesthetic purposes,” he said as we worked on my design. “They got it for medical purposes.”

In the 1950s and ’60s, gold was much cheaper in the Caribbean than it is now, so much so that it wasn’t unusual to use it for dental work like root canals or full-tooth replacements. When the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was signed into law, an influx of Caribbean immigrants made their way to New York City, spurred by the economic downturn in the region following the collapse of the colonial plantation economy. One of those immigrants was McPherson’s uncle, Claudis Carmichael, who came to the United States in 1986.

“Jewelry is a way of life in Guyana,” Carmichael told me, showing me a ring he’d gotten from his mother. “Pieces are passed down from generation to generation.” Gold is naturally plentiful in the country, along with diamonds and, as recently discovered, oil. Carmichael recalls friends growing up who made the dangerous but potentially lucrative journey into what he called the “gold bushes,” mineral-rich stretches of land throughout Guyana’s rainforest terrains. The risks were steep: landslides, malaria, robberies. Many people, he said, never made it back. But the gold that made it home was woven into everything, including people's teeth.

When we dove into old family photos, the golden teeth were everywhere: his sister’s flashing through a grin on her wedding day; Carmichael himself in the early aughts, lovingly staring at his nephew as gold glimmered from his mouth; his mother-in-law, lovingly referred to as Granny, with necklaces, earrings, and bracelets, all made from Guyanese gold.

As Caribbean immigrants settled in the States, gold teeth evolved from a medical practicality into a fashion statement. Then a man named Eddie Plein—a New York City jeweler who would come to be known as the godfather of grillz—took them mainstream, transforming the practice of having one or two gold teeth into mouths full of metals, diamonds, and gems of varying styles, all adorning the teeth of some of the most influential figures in the city, including Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA. The style skyrocketed even further once Plein took his creations to the South.

Then came the backlash, because in America, when Black people make something popular, judgment is rarely far behind. For years, grillz were labeled “ghetto” or “unrefined,” dismissed as a byproduct of hip-hop culture. That narrative held until white celebrities like Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, and Justin Bieber started wearing them in the 2010s. Fashion houses followed, using grillz to add “edge” to their runways and collaborating with jewelry designers to bring their visions to life, all without crediting the community that created the style.

Grillz were suddenly cool, but even as they crossed over, the stigma never fully lifted. There are still those who believe the presence of metals in the mouth looks “unpolished,” and nowhere is that more apparent than the dental industry, according to Natera Wilson, a recent graduate of Howard University’s College of Dentistry. “I’ve gotten lots of negative comments about the metals that I wear on my teeth, not only on social media, but also in many dental institutions,” Dr. Wilson says. She has multiple pairs of grillz—a collection that grew during her years in dental school, along with her fascination with the use of metals for orthodontic care. “Not only was it frowned upon amongst my peers, but there have even been instances of opportunities being threatened for anyone trying to embrace that part of the Black aesthetic."

Growing up in Indiana without many people to look to for community, Dr. Wilson found it elsewhere: on screen. It was the movie B.A.P.S. that introduced her to the world of the Black American Princess, and with it, the allure of gold. “Seeing Nisi, played by Halle Berry, and Mickey, played by Natalie Desselle, made me want to be just like them,” Wilson says. “It wasn’t imagery that I saw frequently, and when I spotted their golds, I was hooked.”

Dr. Wilson had always wanted to be a dentist, but it wasn’t until she entered the industry that she realized how stigmatized gold still was, and how little that stigma had to do with science. Gold, she discovered, is actually a far superior material for dental work than many popular alternatives, including porcelain and zirconia.

“When used for tooth repair, gold has a lifespan of 20 to 40 years, but I’ve known people who have had theirs for 50, 60 years,” Dr. Wilson says. “It’s one of the longest-lasting and most biocompatible materials that can be used in this space, as not many people in the United States are allergic to gold.” By comparison, porcelain and Emax crowns—the industry’s go-to alternatives—only last 10 to 15 years. “There is no medical or scientific research that points to gold being less appropriate to use for dental work than any other material. So its lack of availability is widely due to attitudes and beliefs held in the industry.”

But Dr. Wilson intends to do something about that. As she prepares to return to her home state, she plans to open a practice that combines her love of grillz with her medical expertise, one that will offer her community more agency in a space already fraught with medical distrust. “I would like to see patients be offered all alternatives and be given a choice in the materials that they want used in their care,” she says. “Not only have numerous people told me that they didn’t even know that gold was an option that could be used to fix their teeth, but others have even told me that they’ve been flat out denied when they’ve asked their care providers. I want to change that.”

I’ve had to do a lot of work to deconstruct my own mind from the racist ideals I internalized by way of being born in a former slave colony. My grillz started as a simple act of self-celebration, but as I’ve worn them around New York City this spring, I’ve come to see them as something bigger.

It is a love letter to my culture, my country, and the Black American community I had the privilege of growing up in. It's a way of honoring the sacrifices my ancestors made so that someone like me could have agency over something as personal as the way she adorns her body.

And if that isn't striking gold, I don't know what is.