We all know that job interviews mean making a good first impression. You put on your best suit and a freshly pressed shirt, hoping to impress, but what if your smile is letting you down?

Researchers have conducted simulation experiments that show visible dental conditions can impact your employability. They found that employers can negatively judge your abilities and personal characteristics if you have poor dental appearance. 

Can fixing your teeth fix your job prospects?

Confidence is vitally important in applying for new roles and performing in high-stress assessments and interviews. 

How you feel when you look in the mirror can affect that. Studies on pre and post-dental treatment show that improving the appearance of your teeth can increase self-esteem and confidence. 

Even when many initial interviews are conducted online, that first impression still counts on a video call. The importance of being able to engage with the interviewer is critical, and a warm, friendly smile can go a long way to breaking the ice. 

In many Western cultures, including the UK, people who smile are often seen as more competent, more friendly and more attractive. It is even a key factor in many self-help strategies for improving social well-being.

Can your dentist or dental technician help you get a new job?

While no amount of dental treatment can guarantee better career prospects, it could help your chances. 

Uneven, misaligned, crooked teeth can all be causes of a less-than-perfect smile. With overlapping and crowding, it can be more difficult to keep your teeth clean, too. This causes an increase in plaque build-up, staining, bad breath and even gum disease. 

Ways to improve your smile include orthodontic treatments such as braces or surgery to straighten the teeth. 

Treatment using braces can be followed up with a custom-fitted retainer to prevent mesial drift, a natural process that causes teeth to crowd together in the mouth. Whitening treatments, such as a custom-fit bleaching tray, reduce staining.

In short, a little dental treatment can help you dazzle your next employer with a great smile, as well as your CV!

The main reason why athletes choose a custom-fit mouthguard when they play a contact or combat sport is to keep themselves safer than a boil-and-bite mouthpiece would.

There have been countless examples of teeth being saved by a good mouthguard and, conversely, fights lost by an ill-fitting piece. World Rugby even mandates smart mouthguards to help protect against the long-term effects of concussions and head injuries.

However, there are also studies which suggest that the right mouthguard not only protects an athlete and ensures that they can continue competing without being substituted or having a doctor stop the contest, but also that it can improve athletic performance.

Part of this is related to protection; a significant aspect of high-level competition is psychological in nature, and being certain that you can perform at your best without getting injured allows you to be less apprehensive and focus on the task at hand. 

Somewhat paradoxically, being less afraid of injury can often lead to a lower chance of injury, as tensing up can increase the risk of some injuries (albeit lowering the risk of others).

Beyond this, a proper mouthguard shifts the alignment of your jaw, which is believed to help with muscular strength due to the position of the jaw when it is tensed up. Whilst this remains a preliminary field of study, it is also the principle for which mouthguards are believed to help reduce the risk of concussion.

As well as this, a properly fitted mouthguard allows for the airway to be opened efficiently, which allows for easier intakes of breath, which in turn helps with stamina, endurance and sporting performance in general.

Most athletes are as good as their cardio allows them to be, and the right mouthguard ensures they can be as effective as possible. Some mouthpieces fit so well that people can talk whilst using them, a vital benefit in team sports such as basketball and rugby.

Contact sport injuries are back in the news, but the best way to protect yourself while in full-contact and combat sports is to ensure that your mouthguard is custom-designed for your mouth 

and fits snugly.

The Anthony Joshua vs Jake Paul boxing fight led to the latter breaking his jaw in two places, according to the BBC, following an extremely powerful and accurate right-handed punch directly to the chin.

What has been talked about rather less in the weeks since the brutal knockout punch is how his mouthguard may have helped reduce the impact and prevented an even more serious and complicated injury.

In general, mouthguards help to minimise injuries by spreading the impact of a contact blow throughout the mouth and face, lowering the trauma at the point of contact and keeping the peak forces affecting the jaw at a lower level.

In many cases, this is enough to prevent serious or more serious injuries by minimising the impact in specific areas, similar to a crumple zone in a car, as well as using soft materials to absorb shocks, provide cushions and keep your mouth, teeth and gums in place.

What Injuries Can Mouthguards Prevent?

• Chipped teeth, by keeping teeth firmly in place and providing a physical shield.
• Knocked out teeth, by firmly keeping them in place.
• Tooth pulp damage, by dispersing forces and cushioning gums.
• Fractures to the jaw, by spreading the impact across the whole of the face and body.
• Orthodontic damage, through specially designed custom-fit pieces that cover the brace.

Why Do You Need A Custom Mouthguard?

What matters as much as having a mouthguard is ensuring that you have the right type of mouthguard, as stock devices and low-quality “boil-and-bite” mouthguards may not be enough to protect your teeth.

The better designed your mouthguard, the better it will fit and the more effective it will be at diffusing forces around the mouth.

If you have had braces to straighten your teeth, your orthodontist will have given you a teeth retainer to wear once the braces are removed, but how long do you need to wear it for? 

Firstly, it’s important to understand the purpose of a retainer – namely to ensure your teeth don’t move after you’ve had orthodontic treatment. Wearing a retainer on its own won’t move your teeth. Its purpose is to keep your teeth in place after you’ve had braces. 

Your orthodontist will tell you how long you need to wear your retainer for when you first have your braces removed. This will vary from person to person and will depend on the kind of work you’ve had. 

In the first three to six months after your treatment, you may be advised to wear your retainer during the day as well as overnight, only removing it when you eat or clean your teeth. As a general rule, however, you’ll be advised to wear your retainer every night for at least 12 months. 

Thereafter, you can reduce how often you wear your retainer. However, the only way to ensure your teeth remain straight is to wear a retainer part-time for life. 

What should I do if I lose my retainer?

Given that you won’t be wearing your plastic retainer all the time, it is possible to misplace it. If this should happen, don’t panic. You can buy a new, custom-fit retainer that will ensure your teeth stay in place. 

As a general rule, you’ll need to replace your retainer when it’s showing signs of wear – such as chips or cracks – if it no longer fits your mouth properly, or if there is too much build up of calcium in it. 

If you care for your retainer well and clean it regularly, it can last several years. And, as we’ve mentioned, retainers often get lost, in which case it’s important to buy a new one as soon as possible.

A properly fitted mouthguard can make contact sports considerably safer by reducing the risk of lacerations and even potentially the impacts of head trauma, but exactly how the rules and mouthpiece intersect varies considerably.

In particular, what happens when a mouthguard is knocked loose by an impact or contact is something that can differ considerably depending on the rules of the sport itself.

In rugby, which has implemented the use of smart mouthguards at a more comprehensive level than any other contact sport, any impact strong enough to jolt a properly fitted mouthguard loose would typically qualify as a head acceleration event (HAE).

A HAE, which is typically caused by a direct hit to the head or an impact to the body that jolts the head, will typically cause the smart mouthguard to alert a pitchside doctor, as well as flash red to indicate an incident, putting the player in concussion protocol.

In gridiron football and ice hockey, many mouthguards are directly attached to the body, usually through the helmet, so if a mouthguard comes loose without signs of an injury, it usually remains close to the player to put it back into place.

This is generally the case in contact team sports, where some players have to deliver complex instructions. This requires them to take the mouthpiece out to speak clearly before putting it back in.

The most complex set of rules when it comes to mouthguards can be found in boxing, and there are several instances where ill-fitting mouthpieces have cost people fights.

If a mouthpiece comes out, the referee will call time to stop the action and ensure that it is replaced at the “first opportune moment”.

What makes this complex is that this is at the referee’s discretion, as they are instructed not to interfere with the “immediate action”. This means that an entire exchange could potentially take place without a mouthguard in place.

As well as this, referees are instructed to warn and even deduct points if they believe a boxer has deliberately taken out their mouthpiece.
A 2024 fight between Richard Torrez Jr and Joey Dawejko ended in a rare disqualification, as the latter lost his mouthguard a total of six times, in violation of the rules.

Besides being used to protect teeth, custom-fit mouthguards are being used in contact sports to help make them safer and reduce the long-term risks of harm associated with the game.

The biggest mouthguard-based initiative is found in World Rugby, where a series of sensors and LED lights help pitchside doctors see at a glance if a potential head injury event has taken place and to institute the sport’s concussion protocol.

One of the biggest risks when it comes to concussion is accumulation, which can contribute to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain condition that is linked to personality changes, memory issues and problems with cognitive function.

The smart mouthguards can detect potential concussion events that medical staff may not have spotted, which allows a player to receive care quicker and be removed from a situation where they may sustain further head injuries whilst already concussed.

This has led to discussions about whether smart mouthguards could be incorporated into combat sports such as boxing and mixed martial arts, where the risks of concussions and head trauma are significantly higher.

The largest MMA organisation in the world, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, instituted a concussion protocol in 2021, which involves five stages of recovery from monitoring the initial symptoms to a gradual return to full-contact training.

A smart mouthguard is not mandated in the UFC, nor in any of the biggest boxing organisations, but it could potentially help to provide greater and more immediate insight following a boxing or MMA fight.

Data-collecting mouthguards are used in sparring and training, but they could potentially be used to alert a ringside doctor to the potential of a concussion event, which could allow for doctor stoppages to be employed quicker to protect combatants or for post-concussive care to take place immediately following a fight rather than waiting for self-reported symptoms.

It would require a concerted approach by governing bodies, athletes, and ringside doctors to be brought in, but the success of Rugby’s approach may prove influential.

Whilst the use of custom-fit mouthguards in sports began with boxing, it has been rugby in recent years that has attempted to use adapted gumshields to help protect more than teeth.

Following the implementation of smart mouthguards by governing body World Rugby at all levels of the game, the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup is set to take this initiative further and improve the safety of a sport the governing body admits has a “high risk” of potential head injury.

The main change, as reported by BBC Sport, is the optional but almost universally adopted use of mouthguards with a range of sensors that will flash red if a set of forces (4,500 radians for rotational impacts and 65-75G for acceleration impacts) indicative of a potential head injury event takes place.

These will warn on-pitch officials, other players and the pitchside doctor, enabling them to take the injured player to a safe place off the pitch to perform a 12-minute mandatory head injury assessment.

There are multiple stages of the test, not including obvious signs of concussion such as dizziness, headache, nausea or difficulty with balance. 

These include checking footage to see whether there is evidence that someone is uneasy after an impact, and then a series of memory puzzles and questions are asked to test concentration and memory.

If they seem to struggle, cannot retain concentration or seem hesitant in answering simple but critical questions, they may be removed from the game entirely.

In some respects, this protocol is not new; referees in boxing tend to use their discretion in trying to work out if a boxer is concussed to the point that they can no longer safely continue to box.

An issue that emerged with the previous smart mouthguards is that only the pitchside doctor was informed, which meant that there were occasional delays in getting to a concussed player.

Whilst a voluntary scheme, all but two of the players in the Women’s Rugby World Cup opted to wear them, with the two exceptions being players with braces who wore a dedicated mouthguard to protect them.

Outside of sporting regulations and rules often requiring them, it is almost always a good idea to buy a high-quality mouthguard, as it not only helps to protect your teeth, but a snug bite can also potentially help to avoid serious injuries to the gums, jaw and even the head more broadly.

The world of boxing, being the first sport to incorporate mouthguards, is filled with important lessons about why you need mouthguards, the importance of choosing the right one and even controversies as some competitors take advantage of rules meant to protect them.

However, another lesson comes from the boxer Marlon “Magic Man” Starling, a veteran welterweight boxer known for his excellent defensive prowess, when he boxed Lloyd “Ragamuffin Man” Honeyghan in 1989 for the unified WBC and WBA welterweight championships.

Mr Starling had once joked that he would have fought Mr Honeyghan for free, but it was ironically his thrifty nature that cost him a tooth and nearly cost him the championship during the match.

Freddie Roach, Mr Starling’s trainer, was aghast that Magic Man would keep training and fighting using an old boil-and-bite rubber mouthpiece he bought a very long time ago.

Mr Roach, a man who loved his custom mouthguard so much that when he lost it following a title fight in New England, bemoaned that it was like losing his best friend.

Regardless, Mr Roach would ultimately be proved right during the fight, as Mr Honeyghan hit Mr Starling so hard in the mouth in the first round that the mouthpiece took a tooth with it. This would not have happened had he used a proper mouthguard.

Whilst Mr Starling would ultimately win the fight via technical knockout in the ninth round, and Mr 

Honeyghan would be fined after testing positive for lidocaine, a local anaesthetic used as a numbing agent, the tooth loss took its toll.

He would fight only three more times, winning just one of them before retiring on 19th August 1990, frustrated at losing his last fight to Maurice Blocker. 

Had he used a mouthguard that protected his mouth from punishment, perhaps he would have continued to box and cemented his legacy.

Over the past decade, a growing number of contact sports have focused on the benefits of using custom-fit mouthguards to not only help protect teeth and avoid blood injuries but also to research and minimise the effects of concussions.

Since 2023, World Rugby has incorporated the use of smart mouthguards that lead to immediate concussion substitutions if there is a suitably concerning impact.

However, combat sports have made mouthguards compulsory for decades, and even before it was codified in the rules, fitting a mouthpiece has been considered as essential as an enswell or a pair of boxing gloves for the better part of a century.

The first mouthguards were fitted in 1892 thanks to the innovative dentist Woolf Krouse, using gutta-percha to create a soft guard over the incisors to stop them from being potentially broken over the course of a fight. His son Phillip improved the design and made it reusable.

So effective was the mouthguard that it was considered to be an illegal advantage during a 1921 boxing match between the younger Mr Krause’s friend Ted “Kid” Lewis and Jack Britton. 

It was subsequently banned by the New York State Athletic Commission, a decision they would come to regret six years later.

In a match in 1927 between Mike McTigue and Jack Sharkey, the former was believed to have been dominating the fight, but in round 12 it was suddenly stopped due to a chipped tooth causing what was described as a “dangerous gash” to his lip.

This led to a reversal of the ban by the NYSAC which quickly made them standard issue for all boxers. By the time the rules required them to be worn during a fight, most boxers were already wearing them and looking for the best dentists to provide them with as much protection as possible.

In the near-century since, the issue with mouthguards has less been about their broad effectiveness and more about the use of inadequate mouthpieces which either cause cuts to the inside of the mouth or fall out too easily. A custom-fit mouthpiece avoids this issue entirely.