Teeth

pearly white, gold, or wooden, they tell tales...

Teeth are a symbol of our animal nature, but the way we care for and preserve them reflects our human culture. When teeth fail, crowns, caps and dentures are the common person's prostheses. (You don't have to be a Flannery O'Connor character to have a false tooth, or even to inadvertently lose track of your chompers.) From the cultural commentary of Zadie Smith's White Teeth to the absurdism of Valeria Luiselli's The Story of My Teeth to the weirdly reductive metonymy of V.S. Naipaul's story "My Aunt Gold Teeth," the bony protuberances we use to chew our food (of the lack of them) beat every other body part, hands down, in conjuring distinct personae. Consider Naipaul's Aunt, whose teeth reveal almost as much about her nephew as they do about her:

"I never knew her real name and it is quite likely that she did have one, though I never heard her called anything but Gold Teeth. She did, indeed, have gold teeth. She had sixteen of them. She had married early and she had married well, and shortly after her marriage she exchanged her perfectly sound teeth for gold ones, to announce to the world that her husband was a man of substance." 

PROMPT

Go deep on a description of a character's teeth.