you can call me braceface

Rarely do I follow (because, rarely can I afford to follow) advice from the fashion mags, but I will take as gospel their rule on retro trends: if you wore it the first time, you're too old to wear it now. The downside of this rule is that I'm not crazy about being labeled "too old" for anything. Well, OK, I don't mind being too old to have my birthday party at McDonald's, and occasionally it can be a good excuse to get out of an unpleasant-sounding evening ("I'm too old to go to a GWAR show, but thanks for asking"), but I'm irked every time I see an ad for Gardasil and realize, I'm too old to be vaccinated against cervical cancer. Or read the subtitle on my friend Mary Ellen's column: "Career advice for twentysomethings." (God bless the person at the Post who took "advice for the under-30 crowd" off Carolyn Hax's column.)

The upside of that rule, of course, is that I have a perfectly valid reason not to fall victim to the hideous leggings virus that has infected America. (I've also spotted legwarmers on mannequins, but not on actual people. There seems to be an unspoken but ironclad stand being taken by the American public against allowing calf-enlarging tubes in cloying patterns to be forced upon us again.)

But I am making one exception, and sporting something I wore in the late '80s: braces.

A lot of things consipred to undo the painful orthodontia I was subjected to 20 years ago: my orthodontist's refusal to give me retainers because I was moving away; the sudden and inconvenient appearance of the wisdom teeth that he said would never be a problem; a bad genetic combination of wide teeth and a narrow jaw; age and time and loss of bone density and myriad other problems best described by people with DDS affixed to their names. And over the past two decades I slowly went from having straight teeth to not-so-straight teeth to an overbite and some crowding to teeth overlapping each other at weird angles to crossbites in two spots and constant headaches from TMJ caused by chewing on the right all the time.

A lot's changed since my first attempt at perfect teeth. Impressions now take about 30 seconds to set, down from 20 minutes. (I'm guessing that change was demanded by hygienists who were tired of being puked on [guilty].) The dental community woke up to the fact that wraparound bands, in addition to requiring four hours of sheer torture to apply, rotted peoples' teeth -- apparently not being able to brush anything but the tips for half a decade will do that. And some brilliant, blessed genius got the idea that maybe, just maybe, there was a less painful and obvious way to move teeth. A way that involved clear plastic trays, instead of bands and brackets and wires and rubber bands that shoot across the room when you try to talk to a cute guy.

So no, I don't have old-school braces. I have Invisalign. If you've ever had retainers, or used a night tooth-whitening system, you pretty much know how the trays (they're called aligners) look -- clear, hard plastic custom-molded to fit precisely onto my teeth. The magic is that they don't fit precisely -- they're a few millimeters off, so my teeth get pushed to fit into them. And every two weeks, after my teeth have moved enought to precisely fit into the aligner, I switch to a new one that pushes them a bit more.

I wear them all the time, except to eat. After six days, I've noticed a tiny bit of movement in my bottom teeth, along with a few unexpected benefits:
* Oral hygiene. I'm a sporadic flosser at best, and I've definitely been guilty of falling into bed exhausted without brushing my teeth. But now that popping my aligners onto unclean teeth means trapping the plaque and sugar and god knows what else on them for hours, I've become obsessive about brushing, flossing, mouthwash. And since I'm already doing all that every night, I might as well take off my makeup, too, and do a skin-care routine ...

* Weight loss. Of course I can snack. I just have to go to the bathroom, take out the aligners, clean them, eat the snack, go back to the bathroom, brush and floss, and put the aligners back in.

Needless to say, I haven't eaten between meals all week.

* Bad habits broken. For years I've tried to break my habit of picking and biting my cuticles, and worse, my lips. Nothing has worked -- until I snapped plastic trays over my teeth. I can't bite -- the trays get in the way. In six days, I'm about 90 percent cured of the habit. Invisalign: more effective than hypnosis!

In other news, today I've learned: Christmas trees were meant to be placed in their stand by two people. With an infinite amount of patience. Or one person with nine hands. Cats do not contribute anything to the process, except a pathetic meow when the tree topples onto them.