DR.DENT ad: 30 Seconds To Stop Hiding Your Smile 💜

One hand over his mouth, the other straight at my lens, and he was the father of the bride. Graham, 58, had been dodging cameras for 2 years over something nobody had ever mentioned to him. His daughter had already bought the fix, and he’d hidden it at the back of the cabinet. In 22 years of photographing weddings, I've learned to spot who's hiding their smile long before anyone says cheese. When I say that at parties, people laugh and assume I mean the bride's ex or a teenager who's been dragged along. I let them think that. Most guests imagine I spend the whole day chasing happy faces. A good part of it actually goes on the people who are working very hard to stay out of the photos. They drift to the back row, or they laugh behind their hand and crack a joke about it before anyone can ask. And it's nearly always someone close to the couple. My name is Rob. I've had a small studio in Leeds since I was 29, and I've shot a little over 400 weddings, from register offices with 12 guests to marquees with 200. I fell into it. A mate's photographer cancelled 3 days before his wedding, I had a decent camera, and I said yes before I could talk myself out of it. The man who taught me properly afterwards was Dennis, who'd spent 30 years at a local paper and smoked a roll-up between every set of shots. He had a saying I didn't get for years: "Nobody's scared of the camera, son. They're scared of the photo." He was right. At a wedding nobody minds a phone, because phone pictures disappear into a feed by Monday. My photos go in an album and on the living room wall for the next 30 years, and people know it. I've seen blokes who'll do karaoke in front of 100 people go stiff the second I lift the camera. Off camera they're the loudest at the table. On camera their lips close and their chin turns a bit to the left, like they're checking for a draught. I stopped asking about it a long time ago. People bring these things up on their own or not at all, and if you push, you just get a worse photo. I met Graham 3 months before his daughter Lucy's wedding. She'd booked a relaxed family shoot in the beer garden of their local, the kind I do so families get used to me before the big day. Graham was there before I'd got the bags out of the car. He was 58, a plasterer with forearms like fence posts and a laugh you could hear from the car park. Within 10 minutes he'd got a round in for everyone and dragged a picnic bench into better light for me without being asked. He said 40 years of checking walls for bad patches teaches you plenty about light. Then I picked the camera up, and he changed. His mouth shut, his chin dropped a touch, and the bloke who'd had the whole table in stitches gave me the kind of smile you'd give a traffic warden. I asked for a few of him with Lucy. He waved me off. "Get the young ones, mate. I'm not photogenic." For the rest of the afternoon, every time I raised the camera he remembered something at the bar. I went home with 300 photos, and Graham was in 4 of them, at the edge, mouth closed. I'd seen it at 50 weddings at least. What I didn't know yet was how long it had been going on with him. A few weeks later Lucy came to the studio to go through the day. Most of that meeting is boring stuff like timings and the family photo list, where couples write down who stands with whom. Lucy pushed hers across the table and said, before I'd read a word, "You'll see Dad's crossed himself off half of it." He had. Next to "Bride with Dad" he'd written "maybe". Next to the big family group he'd put "BACK ROW" and underlined it twice. She looked more confused than annoyed. She got her phone out and showed me the slideshow she was making for the reception. In the old photos Graham was grinning so wide you could count his teeth. There was a photo of him on the beach at Filey with Lucy on his shoulders, and another at her graduation in a suit 2 sizes too big. Then she scrolled to the last 2 years, and he was barely there. When he did turn up, he was at the back or half turned away. "He's turned into the family photographer," she said. "Every birthday, every Christmas, it's 'Give it here, I'll take it.' We all thought he was just being nice." She thought it had started around her nephew Alfie's christening, but she couldn't say why. Nobody had said anything to him. Nobody had laughed. He'd just stopped getting in the photos. I asked if she'd talked to him about it. She laughed, but not much. Back in the spring, at Sunday dinner, Graham had made a joke about his "builder's tea teeth". He has 6 mugs a day, strong with 2 sugars, and has done since he was an apprentice. Lucy took it more seriously than he meant it. A week later she turned up with a box of Purple Mouthwash from DR.DENT, the one that comes in little single-use sachets. She'd seen it all over TikTok. She liked that it was alcohol-free, so it wouldn't burn like the green stuff he kept under the sink, and that there was no hydrogen peroxide in it. He thanked her, kissed the top of her head and put the box in the bathroom cabinet. Every few weeks she asked if he'd tried it, and every few weeks she got the same answer: "I'll sort it after the wedding." "After the wedding, Dad," she'd said last time. "The wedding is the whole point." He laughed and started talking about the cake. I've heard that answer from a lot of dads. They'll drive 200 miles to fix a leak in their daughter's flat, but anything for themselves goes on a list that starts with "after". I didn't say that to Lucy. I told her I'd sort the photo list and not to worry. Walking her back to the car, I already knew which photo I'd be chasing on the day, and it wasn't on her list. On the morning of the wedding Lucy was getting ready at her dad's house, a semi on the edge of Horsforth. Upstairs was chaos: 3 bridesmaids and a hairdryer that kept tripping the fuse. I left them to it and went to find Graham. He was downstairs in a pressed white shirt, with his suit hanging on the back of the door like it was waiting for a job interview. He'd been dressed since 7. I asked if I could get a few shots of him doing his tie in the bathroom mirror. Dads usually say no to that one, but he shrugged and said, "Go on then, you're the boss." He opened the mirror cabinet to get his aftershave out, and there it was, right at the back behind the plasters: a purple box, still in its cellophane. He saw me see it. For a few seconds neither of us said anything. Then he sat down on the edge of the bath and said, "She told you, didn't she?" "She told me you'd crossed yourself off the photo list," I said. He didn't answer straight away. Then he told me about Alfie's christening. Someone had taken a lovely photo of him holding the baby, both of them grinning, and his other daughter Sarah had stuck it on her fridge. Every time he went round and made a brew, there it was. "Nice shirt, my grandson, best day of the year," he said. "And all I could see was a mouthful of teeth the colour of my tea." Nobody had ever said a word about it, he told me. He tapped the side of his head. "It's all up here. But once you've seen it, you can't stop seeing it." Today there'd be 100 people looking at him, and Lucy was going to put the photos on the wall for the next 30 years. I told him what Dennis used to say about people being scared of the photo. Then I told him something I'd never said to a client. "I've done 400 weddings. Not 1 bride has ever rung me to complain about her dad's teeth. They ring me when he isn't in the photos." He looked at the box for a long time. "I told her I'd sort it after the wedding," he said, and then he laughed properly for the only time that morning. "Bit late for 'after', isn't it?" He picked at the cellophane with a thumbnail that had 40 years of plaster in it, put his reading glasses on and read the back of the box out loud like it was the instructions for a new boiler. The idea is simple once you hear it. Purple and yellow cancel each other out, so a purple tint on your teeth makes the yellow less obvious. Nothing gets bleached. "So it's a colour trick," he said, pleased with himself for working it out. He kept reading. Pyrophosphate and hyaluronic acid. "That's in her mum's face cream," he said. "Now it's in my mouthwash. What a world." Then he got to the bit that made him go quiet. Because it's only a tint, it shows on dental work too. Graham has a crown on a front tooth from a 5-a-side game in 1998, and it had always looked a slightly different shade from the rest. "So it does the crown as well?" he asked me, as if I'd know. The box said it did. He tore a sachet open, tipped the 12ml in and started swishing, and I checked my watch out of habit. Halfway through he tried to say something and nearly sprayed purple down his clean shirt, and we were both in bits. At 30 seconds he spat and ran the tap. The purple went straight down the plughole, and he stuck his tongue out at the mirror twice to make sure it hadn't stayed purple. It hadn't. I'm not going to tell you he suddenly looked like someone off the telly. He looked like Graham. The yellow just wasn't the 1st thing you noticed anymore, and he'd clearly seen the same thing, because he kept looking. Then he read the small print again. The tint fades once you've eaten or had a brew, and with 6 brews a day it was never going to last till teatime. That's why the box says 1 sachet every morning after brushing, and why there are 20 of them in there. "So it's a morning job," he said. "Like putting the kettle on." I took a photo of him right then, tie half done, grinning at himself in the mirror. Lucy has it framed now. I've thought about that morning a lot since. The purple did its bit, but I think the bigger thing was that he'd finally opened the box he'd been avoiding for 6 months. The ceremony was at 1 o'clock in a converted barn near Otley. I didn't watch the vows half as closely as I watched Graham. He smiled at Lucy all the way down the aisle, and for once he didn't close his mouth to do it. When we lined up the big family group, Sarah's husband had his phone out and, from pure habit, went to hand it to Graham. "Give it here, I'll take it" had been his line for 2 years. He walked straight past the phone and stood in the front row, next to Lucy. I looked down at the list on my clipboard, where it still said BACK ROW, underlined twice, and crossed it out myself. His speech ran 6 minutes over. Halfway through he worked out that he'd drunk about 65,000 brews since Lucy was born and said that explained why he'd always been skint. The whole barn was howling, and so was he, laughing with his whole face. Later, out of habit, I went through every group shot looking for someone hiding their smile. For once, it wasn't him. The photo I'm proudest of from that day is one most people would scroll straight past. It's Graham at the top table in his hired suit, head back, laughing at something Lucy has just said, with his mouth wide open. Lucy rang me 10 minutes after I sent the gallery. She didn't mention the dress or the flowers. She wanted to know if I had any more of her dad like that. I'd delivered 640 photos, and Graham was in 118 of them. A couple of months later she sent me a photo from Alfie's 3rd birthday. Graham is on the sofa with Alfie on his knee, and both of them are grinning. Sarah has swapped the christening photo on her fridge for that one. Lucy told me the purple box lives next to his toothbrush now, and he does his 30 seconds every morning before he puts the kettle on. He still has his 6 brews a day. He's not giving those up for anyone, and nobody has asked him to. I think about Graham whenever I go through a family photo list. Nobody had ever said a word about his teeth. The whole thing lived in his head, and the box that could have helped sat in his cabinet for 6 months behind the plasters. Dennis was right about him too. Graham was never scared of my camera. He was scared of a photo on the wall, and he spent 2 years making sure there wasn't one. These days, when I spot a dad at the back of a group laughing behind his hand, I don't try to sneak a shot of him. I wait until the speeches are done, find him at the bar and tell him about a plasterer from Horsforth who nearly crossed himself out of his own daughter's wedding. Most of them laugh. A few of them ask me what was in the purple box. Rob H. --- P.S. from the DR.DENT team 💜 What was in the purple box? ✅ 20 single-use 12 ml sachets of DR.DENT Purple Mouthwash ✅ Purple colour correction tones down yellow straight after you rinse, on natural teeth and on crowns ✅ Alcohol-free and made without hydrogen peroxide ✅ Brush, tear, swish for 30 seconds, spit. A morning job, like putting the kettle on If you're a 6-brews-a-day person too, Subscribe & Save 20% and a fresh box arrives every month: £15.99 instead of £19.99. BEST VALUE: the 3-Pack, £35.18 with Subscribe & Save or £43.97 as a one-time purchase. And you're covered by our 30-day money-back guarantee. https://shop.drdent.co/products/purple-mouthwash