$800 smiles for all

Thursday, June 1, 2006 | 7:22 a.m.

Jacory Hawkins has a problem: His $800 gold teeth are suddenly nothing special.

Hawkins got his "grill" - slang for a row of precious metal molds worn over natural teeth - in white gold last year. The Valley High School student was the first among his friends to have a grill and paid extra to have tinted black diamonds inlaid across his four front teeth, spelling out his nickname: HAWK.

At a football game last weekend, however, it seemed almost everyone was flashing semiprecious smiles. And Hawkins, 17, no longer felt his diamond smile cut through the rough.

So Hawkins put in an order with Mr. Bling, a Las Vegas manufacturer, for a new grill. By Friday, Hawkins should have his new look - a row of white gold caps to span his lower jaw, encrusted with 40 diamonds. He will spend as much on the bottom as he did on the top: $800.

"The more shiny, the better it looks to me. The more diamonds, the better it looks to me," Hawkins says. "If you like smiling, if you like to have diamonds in your mouth, I guess it's the thing to do."

Grill vogue is spreading throughout Las Vegas, and specialty stores that make and sell the false fronts have come to Nevada to meet the demand.

Mr. Bling, originally from California, came two years ago. Owner Eric Seong moved the store when competition in Northern California, where grills have been popular for several years, got too tough.

Seong, a 10-year dental jewelry veteran, says he gets about 400 orders a month, some coming from his online business, which draws customers from across the U.S. and Europe.

More recently, Mr. Bling has started to receive a number of orders from soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, store manager John Hallett says. Mainly, the soldiers seem to be ordering white gold grills that emphasize their incisors - or fangs.

"I don't know what the significance is," he says. "We get a lot of fang orders."

J's Grills has two stores, one in a North Las Vegas strip mall and a second at the Rancho Indoor Swap Meet.

Prices for the most basic grills - six teeth, flat gold - start at about $250 at both stores. Embellishments, from etchings to diamonds, quickly add up.

J's Grills manager Paul Lim says that he once sold a platinum set, fully studded with diamonds, for $20,000, but he won't identify the customer.

A typical Las Vegas buyer spends about $500, although it's not uncommon to see customers spend $5,000, Hallett says.

Since October, grills with princess-cut diamonds - small jewels set flush against each other from one end of the grill to the other - have been in high demand. That's in part because of rapper Paul Wall, who popularized the look with a series of songs championing metal mouth, Hallett says.

"White gold, yellow gold, rose gold, platinum if they really want to spend the money," he says. "Bottoms don't show up as much, so they will usually go with the top. But if they have the money, they'll get top and bottom."

Wall's mouth reportedly contains about $30,000 in diamonds, and it's prominently open and grinning across the cover of his most recent CD, "The People's Champ."

In a song titled "Grillz," Wall rhymes: "Open up my mouth, see more carats than a salad. My teeth are mind-blowing, giving everybody chills - call me George Foreman, because I'm selling everybody grills."

Frequently featured in hip-hop magazines and music videos, grills prompted Canadian Internet marketer Jamie Lynch to launch a Web site in April where grill owners and fans can post pictures of their teeth and rate the quality of each other's smiles.

The site, SeeMyGrill.com, is the first of its kind and has 1,000-3,000 unique visitors every day, Lynch says. Visitors can scroll through roughly 250 photos people have submitted of their diamond-laden teeth and comment on the look - sometimes offering praise, but more often harsh words.

"There is such a competitive factor between people who have grills," Lynch says. "You've got all kinds of people who want to show off their grills."

The idea for the site came to Lynch as he researched popular terms entered by Internet browsers.

People searching for "grill," "tooth grill," "gangster grill" and "Paul Wall grillz" accounted for several hundred thousand searches in April alone, according to one tracking program Lynch uses.

"I saw there was this huge query frequency for gold teeth and grill searches," he says. "It's unbelievable, people are going crazy for it."

Meanwhile, at Mr. Bling, walk-in customers have a mold of their teeth made on-site, then must wait from three days to a week while the grill is fabricated in-house.

At J's Grills, the entire mold is sent to Texas. Within a week, the completed grill comes back, fit to the customer's mouth, Lim says.

Are there any downsides to the new look?

Repeat customer Hawkins says learning how to speak with a mouth full of metal can be tricky: "It sort of slurs you up at first. And if you don't brush it, you get bad breath or saliva stuck underneath."