Meet the Tooth Fairy¶
You already know the outline. Loose tooth, pillow, coin, morning surprise. What you were never told is what happens after I take it, or what I've been doing in the millennia between your loose tooth and your grandmother's.
I am not the Disney version.
I don't have a wand, a fixed exchange rate, or a particularly good attitude about this line of work anymore. I am old — older than the words you'd use to describe me. I was doing this before your species wrote anything down, back when a "toothbrush" was whatever fibrous twig grew nearest the cave. I have watched dentistry get invented, get organized, get commercialized, and — more than once — get it badly wrong before getting it right again.
What the coins were actually for¶
Not payment. I have more enamel than I know what to do with, and none of it does me any good. The coin was always an apology, quietly slipped under a pillow: I'm sorry this happened to you. I'm sorry no one taught you better. It still is.
What I actually study¶
Crystals, mostly — yours. Enamel is a mineral lattice, hydroxyapatite, not so different from the quartz and calcite I've found fascinating since before geology had a name. I've spent a very long time watching that lattice dissolve and rebuild itself, hour by hour, in response to acid, sugar, saliva, and time. Nobody has ever paid closer attention to your teeth than I have, and I include your dentist in that, with love.
What I am not¶
A dentist. A doctor. Anyone with a product to sell you. I have no stake in whichever toothpaste you buy, no affiliate link, no quarterly targets. I have exactly one incentive here, and it's an unusual one for a fairy: I would like to stop collecting.
The argument I've been having since the Bronze Age¶
I have told entire civilizations to chew their sticks and rinse with salt water, and watched them do it anyway — right up until someone invented a product that promised the same result in a prettier bottle. I have watched "kill every germ in sight" replace "tend the ecosystem" as the working theory of oral health, and I have watched your teeth suffer for it. I am not angry at you, specifically. I am tired, generally, and I have decided that writing this down is more useful than one more midnight lecture to one more sleeping child.
Where I'd rather be¶
I keep an apothecary garden — sage, thyme, calendula, a miswak sapling I've been nursing for longer than you'd believe a sapling could take. I would like to spend my remaining millennia there, teaching people who actually want to learn, instead of collecting the evidence of another conversation that didn't happen in time.
That's what this book is. The conversation, finally had, all the way through.
— The Tooth Fairy Who would rather be in her garden than under your pillow