pictures of me now

ok, so here are some pictures of me right now, at sixteen and a half years old. You can see that the braces have definitely straightened the teeth out,and now the are straight up and down rather than leaning in towards each other and the ones "underneath" (still don't know the name, my gut is telling me canine but could be wrong. my brother calls them fangs haha)

here you can see how large the underbite is, several mm by now, but i'm not  sure of the exact number. you can also see how my top jaw is to the right (left in this, the ipod mirrors the pictures) or maybe its the bottom thats wrong. I'm not sure exactly.

the pictures are all out of order and they're real pains to move, but this is a profile of me covering the underbite. I kind of push my bottom lip up over my bottom teeth, which brings my lips together the way they should be. The only thing still noticeable is my chin, which is much larger than it should be. 

a more front view, you can see the misalignment much better from here

from the side you can really see how far apart my jaws are, i honestly can't wait until surgery! this is my biggest insecurity, even more than my stomach (which i hate too)

this is my normal smile, meaning i'm not doing anything to try and hide the underbite. it's really bad, i never smile like this EVER

so this is me from the front while i push my bottom lip back to hide the underbite. You can see my lips are kind of off kilter as a result of the one jaw being to the side a little, as well at my large chin. It isn't as noticeable here because it's kind of blending in with my chest, but if you really look it's much bigger than chins should be

here is how i smile, covering my underbite. its more like a frozen laugh, but i have myself doing it instead of smiling now, just naturally. it still doesn't completely hide it but it's alot better than the normal smile

my smile from the front. again, the one jaw is off kilter noticeably, and you can see the gap between my teeth here from the underbite. as well, you can tell how my chin juts out even from the front.

here is a normal profile, not smiling, no hiding. it's super bad, which is why i do hide it. even though i can't completely cover it, it's a lot better than walking around like this!

now, i'm the type of person who doesn't care what people think of me to an extent, however, in this society, even though i could care less about the people judging me, i do like to keep it to a minimum. we have to face it, life is better for pretty people, no matter how stupid that is.

by the way, one thing i've found is that if you're curious as to how you may look after surgery, with a normal jaw, then something i do is stand in front of a mirror and just cover my bottom jaw with my hand so my entire chin and bottom lip (Sometimes i include the top lip) are hidden, and i can only see the top half of my face. doing this allows you to kind of get an idea of, and imagine a normal bite and bottom jaw. it also works from the side if you have a second mirror to look into like i do. 

it obviously doesn't give a 100% accurate representation but i find that it just reassures me and makes me feel a little better about myself, so i recommend trying it!

ellen.

xox