In a two-storey house in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, Dr Mike Mew perches on an ergonomic kneeling chair in front of two vast computer monitors, a microphone and three dazzling studio lights mounted on a rig, a vision mixing console and a studio camera complete with Autocue. Behind him, on a white shelf, is an enormous plastic mouth with perfectly aligned teeth.
Among stacks of files on the shelves below the oversized mouth, there are board games, a crystal-making kit, a pottery craft set – unwelcome reminders that this is not actually a dental clinic but a family home. The toys will need to be covered up before Mew’s new plans can be put into action. “The final thing for me to do is to go to Ikea and buy some white boxes,” he tells me. “Then I can sit here and I can change the world.”
Mew’s desk is the pulpit from which he spreads his gospel about optimal posture, how it can make our faces more attractive and – he claims – save us from an early death. (It is an adjustable desk, with a digital scale displaying its height; every three hours, an alarm goes off reminding Mew to stand up.) He is obsessed with posture, and with suboptimal faces. All around him he sees a world plagued by avoidable ugliness that he fears is leading to a public health crisis with existential consequences for humankind. It’s an obsession that has made Mew the world’s first viral orthodontist, and turned his name into a verb.
If you haven’t heard of “mewing” – the postural technique that involves lodging your tongue in the roof of your mouth for hours on end to “align the teeth, accentuate your cheekbones, sharpen your jawline and even straighten your nose naturally”, as he promises in his Ultimate Mewing Guide – ask a teenager to explain it to you. First popularised on “incel” forums a decade ago, Google searches for mewing spiked last year when looksmaxxing – the practice of doing whatever you can to make the most of what nature gave you – exploded on TikTok. Mewing promises visible results without expense, surgery, braces or any clinical intervention. The same algorithm that introduced Andrew Tate to the masses has caused mewing videos to be seen billions of times on TikTok alone; most feature boys, but girls are now doing it, too.
Over the past year, teachers across the US and UK have complained that students are refusing to answer questions in class because opening their mouths would interrupt their mewing. The mewing subreddit – filled with before-and-after images of mostly young men pulling expressions that call to mind Zoolander’s Blue Steel – has 64,000 members. Mew’s YouTube channel has more than half a million subscribers; his Ultimate Mewing Guide alone has attracted 9m views since it was uploaded a year ago. Mewing has been discussed everywhere from Vogue to The Joe Rogan Experience to ITV’s This Morning. Mewing has gone mainstream.
Mew, 55, has a remarkable jaw. It is a lantern jaw, wide and square, framed by sinuous, muscular chops, the love child of a Disney prince and an XL bully. His jaw, he tells me, is the product of both constant mewing and the intervention and experimentation of his father, the orthodontist John Mew, now 96, who made him wear a bespoke palate-expanding device throughout his childhood. John Mew came up with the ideas that Mike Mew promotes in his videos. The latest of three generations of orthodontists, Mew is determined to continue his father’s crusade against weak jaws and what his family calls “poor facial form”.
But at the same time as mewing was going gangbusters online, Mike Mew’s orthodontic career was disintegrating. In November, three decades after he qualified as a dentist, he was struck off the register of the General Dental Council (GDC) following complaints of unnecessary and harrowing treatment of two children in his clinic; a six-year-old patient was said to have suffered “seizure-like episodes” when asked to comply with Mew’s treatment plan. Mew is now officially suspended, pending his appeal.
Mew thinks the disciplinary investigation against him was ideologically motivated. He was first reported to the GDC in 2017; years of uncertainty over the case destroyed his business, his family and his mental health, he tells me. He and his wife have separated; on the day I visit he’s taking care of his two young daughters alone. It is also the day after he met with liquidators. “The company went bust yesterday,” he laments. “I’m struggling. Until last week, I couldn’t sit down at a keyboard. Right now, the whole mission is stuck.”
I am here to find out what that mission really is. Over the five hours I will spend with Mew in Tunbridge Wells, he will appraise the attractiveness of my face no fewer than four times, entirely unbidden. (I am “middle of the road”, unfortunately – more on that later – but there are measures I can take to improve things, should I have the necessary will and commitment.) He will refer to some of the children who appeared at his clinic as “little shits”. He will make breathtaking generalisations about beauty, linking them to alarming claims about health. And within all this will be a simple question that traditional orthodontics cannot yet fully answer: why do so many people in the developed world now have misaligned jaws and wonky teeth?
Mew argues that modern lifestyles are to blame. He intends to use his home studio to spread the message around the world. And it is likely to travel far: it chimes with prevailing anxieties about masculinity, our growing mistrust of mainstream doctrine and our total obsession with our looks. Mew provides an accessible solution and an easy answer, but it comes with uncomfortable implications: if your face is unattractive, he argues, it’s your fault.
“The beauty of faces is predominantly in the maxilla, the top jaw, the mid-third of the face,” Mew tells me, gesturing across his cheekbones from ear to ear. He turns to one of his massive monitors and clicks on a file entitled “Excellent natural development”. Thumbnails of 20 or so square-jawed people fill the screen: the models Tyson Beckford, Jordan Barrett and Tara Lynn; Nelson Mandela and Kurt Cobain. Most of the images are of Indigenous men and women – Inuit people, members of different Amazonian tribes, people from east and southern Africa in traditional dress. His cursor lingers over an image of Kylie Jenner. (The extent to which Jenner’s face is an example of “natural development” is, of course, open to serious question.)
If this is good facial form, I ask, what’s bad? A few clicks and Mark Zuckerberg fills the screen. “He’s a great example. Look!” Mew says, with disgust. “His whole face is lengthened. And look at this tiny, narrow smile.”
Next, he pulls up an image of some Maasai people, all with broad jaws and perfect teeth. “They stand bolt upright, big, broad smiles with all 32 teeth in, including the wisdom teeth, and space behind the wisdom teeth. They look just like our ancestors.” He is talking about skulls he says he has seen in museums. And while I can’t find studies that indicate all Maasai people have good teeth, Mew’s observation about our ancestors does appear to be backed up by anthropologists: examples of jaw misalignment – malocclusion – in human skulls from the time of hunter-gatherers are vanishingly rare.
Most orthodontists argue there is a strong hereditary component to malocclusion. The American Association of Orthodonists says facial structure results from “a complex interplay of genetics, bone growth and muscle development”. But Mew says genes can’t explain it. “There’s been a massive change in craniofacial structure. It’s been too fast to be genetic. It doesn’t add up.”
Mew has been writing letters to dental journals asking for a debate on the causes of malocclusion since 2009. Orthodontists who work with fixed braces are pulling the teeth straight without widening the jaw to accommodate them, he says, treating the effects without bothering to investigate the causes. “It’s rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic: it looks nice, but does anyone notice the deck is starting to tilt? We’re treating almost certainly over half the children in the developed world.”
Two things have changed in the developed world that Mew holds responsible. First, he says, our food is much softer: we don’t chew enough, so our jaw muscles are weaker than our ancestors’, or those of people who don’t eat processed food. “I’ve got a strong jaw. A strong jaw is also a big jaw. I have more space for my teeth in that big jaw.” He slaps his chops with his palms. “I’ve worked it. You get a strong jaw by using it. That’s why I think kids should be chewing gum. It’s not rocket science.” (Despite Mew’s admittedly mighty jaw, I can’t help noticing that two of his teeth are crossing slightly on his bottom jaw, in visible disobedience.)
Second, Mew argues, we’re getting blocked noses – perhaps from pollution or allergies or colds – and it’s leading to an epidemic of mouth-breathing. “I don’t know what’s caused the nasal obstructions; that’s not my area,” he says with a dismissive wave of his hand. “But if you’ve got a blocked nose, you’re going to have to take the tongue off the roof of the mouth, separate your lips and hang your mouth down. If you have weak jaw muscles and you hang your mouth open, then you look like this.” He stands up to pose – slack-jawed, tongue fat, neck curved – in a grotesque parody of a mouth-breathing nerd. “Your face lengthens. The face drops down as the mandible opens and it gets longer and thinner.”
Mew’s father invented the concept of “orthotropics”, meaning “correct growth”. He theorised that the face can be made to develop in a certain way if a person exercises their jaw and adopts the correct posture. “Bones are slaves to the muscles,” Mew tells me: hold yourself properly and your face will grow accordingly.
But Mew makes onerous demands of his disciples. “You need to have a complete change in not only your tongue posture but also how you use the muscles in your face and the posture you have for sitting and standing,” he tells his YouTube audience, recommending that they mew whenever they are not talking or eating; he suggests those who find it difficult begin with eight hours of mewing a day.
I ask for a mewing lesson. He makes me take a sip of water, hold it on my tongue, bite my teeth together, pull a big cheesy smile, raise my eyebrows and then swallow. This isn’t even mewing yet – it’s so I can identify the back third of my tongue. Next, I need to pull my tongue back, put my teeth together, swallow with a “Mona Lisa” face (expressionless above my mouth) again and again, with my tongue sucked on to the roof of my palate. “Then all the soft tissues will mould into that position. And once you’ve got that working really well, it stays there. You can hold the suction indefinitely.”
I feel silly doing it. But I need to, Mew says. “Most people who look suboptimal are using the wrong muscles. You have narrow lips because you tend to suck them in. If you did this” – he pouts – “they’d look bigger.”
This completely throws me. You’re talking specifically about my lips, I ask. “Your upper lip’s narrow,” he replies, matter-of-factly. “You should be more hollow here.” He motions either side of my cheeks. “You need your tongue on the roof of your mouth a little bit, because you’re just a little bit deficient here.” He shrugs. “It’s not rocket science.”
This is about more than beauty, Mew insists. If people are mouth-breathing with weak jaws, he claims, they are putting themselves in danger. “The space for the tongue, the airway and the teeth – the vital space – is rapidly decreasing.” He has invented a term for this: craniofacial dystrophy. “A long time ago, I realised we needed a pathology,” he tells me, sagely. He shows me an animation entitled “Craniofacial Dystrophy – General”. It features a bald head, ghostly white, its face growing downwards, its nose lengthening, its eyes drooping, until it ends up cartoonishly hideous. I imagine teenagers watching this animation, listening to Dr Mew in the blue scrubs he wears in his videos, and reacting in horror. Craniofacial dystrophy sounds very medical, I say. “It’s the correct term.” Isn’t he just talking about ugliness? “Incorrect facial form,” he shrugs. “If your face isn’t formed properly you won’t live as long, because of sleep apnoea – 20% of people over 60 are going to die a decade early from sleep apnoea and its consequences.”
When I ask what the evidence is that links stop-start breathing during sleep with malocclusion, he draws two exponential graphs in the air. “You can see malocclusions going up like this. You can see sleep apnoea going up like this.” But correlation is not causation. How can he prove that misaligned jaws are causing sleep apnoea? Mew pauses for several seconds, with his hand over his mouth. “I’m going to have to come back to you on that,” he says. An hour later, he will find on his shelves a book entitled Sleep Disorders in Paediatric Dentistry, which he will slam down on the desk in front of me. “There we go – you wanted the information. It’s bound to be in there.” When it comes to hard evidence, Mew can be frustratingly vague.
If you listen carefully to the wording in Mew’s videos, you can hear caveats: mewing “may” diminish your wrinkles; it’s only “potentially extending your lifespan by enlarging your airways”. But I can imagine the delicate phrasing will be lost amid some of his genuinely alarming claims. In his Ultimate Mewing Guide, he compares a pair of identical twins: one used orthotropic techniques; the other went to a traditional orthodontist and had braces. “The twin treated with orthodontics has a downward developed upper jaw. That means he probably has less air space, which means he will probably be more prone to sleep apnoea, which is likely to reduce life expectancy.” Amid the probablys and the likelys, the message Mew wants viewers to take away is clear: the twin who had braces will die first.
“I think it’s true,” Mew shrugs when I put this to him. “I stand by those statements. I would love to argue these points with someone. I want to go as close to the line as I can to provoke a discussion.”
Sleep apnoea is only one of an extraordinary range of problems Mew attributes to malocclusion. He reels them off. “Jaw joint issues, tinnitus, sinusitis, deviated septums, all ENT [ear, nose and throat] problems from glue ear to you name it, forward head posture, ADHD.” He claims that ADHD is caused by sleep deprivation, which is caused by sleep apnoea, which comes from malocclusion. While people with ADHD are much more likely to have sleep disorders, the problems may be caused by the ADHD. Again, correlation does not prove causation.
The twins in his Ultimate Guide to Mewing video make me think of my sister, who needed braces, when I never did. We grew up in the same environment; we were being fed the same foods. How does Mew explain that? “You might have enjoyed chewing more. She might have hung her mouth open when you didn’t,” he replies. “Now, is your sister’s face more or less aesthetically pleasing than yours?”
I can’t answer that, I say, flummoxed – she’s my sister.
“The theory I would propose,” he declares, “is you would have a more balanced facial form than she did.”
For Mew, beauty and health are intertwined. “Your face is the CV of your health. Intrinsically, you know what looks healthy. We’ve got a word for that, and it’s attractive.” We have evolved to be attracted to healthy people; if you have “craniofacial dystrophy”, “people are aware that you are not as good partner material”.
It’s easy to see how the sweeping statements Mew makes would gain traction online – particularly on incel message boards. They make intuitive sense, they are alarming enough to go viral and they purport to contain truths hidden by the orthodontic establishment, an industry that’s profiting from people who, Mew argues, can achieve better results for free. He claims to be giving powerless people agency – over their looks, their health, their love lives, their whole destinies.
“The kids have realised that not only did they not want orthodontics,” Mew says, “but their parents were being deceived to get orthodontics. This has caused damage to their health, and they’re desperately trying to recover. They are an angry group. And there’s a hell of a lot of them.”
Mew swears that he never knew what the manosphere was before he began to become a phenomenon among incels. He started making videos in 2014 as a marketing device to bring customers to the family practice in Purley, south London, which he took over after his father retired. Parents were coming to the clinic with no understanding of the treatment their children would receive there. The Mews advocated the use of “bioblocs” – bespoke palate-expanding devices invented by Mew’s father – to encourage “correct” facial growth; they are designed to hurt if your posture is wrong. (After a career spent arguing that traditional fixed braces were unnecessary and even dangerous, the GDC took away Mew’s father’s licence to practise in 2017, when he was 89, following claims of false advertising and breaching patient confidentiality.)
“At the time, we weren’t getting in the right type of patients,” Mew tells me. “People turned up to see us expecting someone to make them better, and when you tell them they’ve got to make themselves better, it’s never going to work.”
A tech-savvy nurse at the clinic suggested they churn out lots of quick videos with Mew going through a few technical terms, explaining his father’s ideas and his belief that faces aren’t fixed and can be trained to change. The videos didn’t get much of an audience until he got an invitation to speak at something called the 21 Convention at a hotel in London. Mew says he knew “absolutely nothing” about 21 Studios, the organisation behind it. But its homepage tells you everything you’d need to know. “Since 2006, 21 Studios has been at the cutting edge of masculine self-improvement for men and fathers,” it reads. “100% Toxic Masculinity. Zero Compromise. Zero Apology.”
Jaws have long been associated with masculinity. Testosterone makes jaws more pronounced during puberty, which has led some to assume that the bigger the jaw, the manlier the man. Some transgender women pay thousands to have their jaw narrowed with facial feminisation surgery; some young men have been paying similar amounts to have implants to make their jaw appear broader. A chiselled jaw is a defining feature of a “chad” – a term used on incel message boards for the men who are supposed to get all the women. The manosphere had been crying out for a man like Mew.
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There were only 20 or 25 people in the audience, but once he finished his hour-long presentation, they mobbed him, demanding advice on how to improve their faces. “And I’m looking at them a little bit perplexed,” Mew remembers. “So I said to them, ‘Look, in a way you’d be crazy to try this because it’s so hard, but in a way you’d be crazy not to because what else are you doing with your tongue? But you need to do this all the time.’” Instead of using a biobloc to expand the dental arches – the curved row of teeth – in the jaws of children, Mew was advocating a postural technique for adults, with the tongue lodged in the palate. Thus mewing was born.
It wasn’t called mewing yet – the name emerged organically, on the message boards. “We had a Google alert on my name, and we saw some people were starting to ask questions in a wonderful forum called Sluthate,” Mew tells me with an overexaggerated chuckle that makes his shoulders bounce up and down. Now defunct, Sluthate was a notorious platform that, in a previous incarnation (PUAHate), had been the home of Elliot Rodger, the self-described incel who killed six people and himself in a California mass shooting in 2014.
What did he know about Sluthate? “Zero,” Mew replies immediately, as if the clue wasn’t in the name. He started engaging with forum members, sharing tips on how to mew properly, making videos responding to their questions. They liked his outsider status and loved his message: that the orthodontic elites had been lying to them, and that they had agency over their looks. He put his previous marketing strategy aside; instead of trying to reach parents of young children, he now wanted to talk to anyone who would listen. “Getting the information out is my life’s mission.”
His clinic was supposed to treat only patients under the age of 12, but it began to be bombarded with inquiries from young men. “It became painful. Reception would complain that people were calling back-to-back and no one else could get through.” Mew says he did take on a few adults – “people that I liked” – but the bulk of his patients were still children. Just before Covid hit, a third of his clients were travelling from overseas.
At one point, he tells me, he had a consultation with a woman and her three children who were prepared to fly over from their home in Houston, Texas, for regular treatment with Mew. “I just refused her. I said, ‘It’s not going to work. If I was treating you, with your motivation, that would be great. But you’ve got three little shits here. I can just see from the way they’re standing there, they ain’t going to do anything I ask.’”
An orthotropic approach requires serious commitment. “Unless you, as an individual, put the effort into change, you won’t get a result,” Mew continues. “I’ve had one or two cases that didn’t go well, and the parents literally said to me, ‘Mike, you tried your best. I know the little shit here never did what you wanted.’”
This is perhaps the biggest problem with orthotropics, in empirical, scientific terms: the theory that, with enough dedication, people can direct the growth of their faces is impossible to disprove. If a child with a biobloc doesn’t see results, Mew can point to the child’s lack of commitment. If someone who mews doesn’t achieve “correct facial form”, he can simply claim that the mewer hasn’t been mewing correctly, or for long enough.
Mew’s keenest disciples have documented their success. Some, such as AstroSky (with 57,000 YouTube subscribers), have become looksmaxxing influencers themselves. And many of the before-and-after mewing pictures on TikTok and Reddit appear to show visible changes over several years in the lives of young people. But couldn’t those same people just be going through puberty and emerging with a more defined face?
“I’m sure there’s an element of truth there,” Mew concedes. “However, I’ve seen enough major changes from mewing that are not questionable. The change is so extreme – their friends are talking about it, the family’s talking about it – but it’s not always obvious in photographs.” Like much of what Mew argues, it’s supposed to be obvious to everyone, even if it can’t yet be scientifically proved.
An alarm goes off on Mew’s phone, reminding him that he has to pick up his daughters from primary school. He invites me to join him on the school run. “Bad,” he mutters as we approach the school. “Bad. One in two so far. It’s not going well.” And then I realise – he is assessing the faces of the children as they come out of the gates towards us. “It’s going to ruin their lives.” His teeth are clenched. “This is a lovely school, it really is. Really helpful teachers. If only I could get them to get the kids to keep their mouths fucking closed.” A woman – perhaps a teacher – waves at Mew as we walk past and he waves back, warmly. Then he turns to me, horrified. “You see that gummy smile?”
Back at home, Mew fixes his daughters a drink and a snack (bread and butter, surprisingly soft), and reminds them that they should be chewing gum at all times while not eating. The girls entertain themselves in the living room while Mew and I return to his office/television studio.
“All those kids.” He takes a deep breath. “We have a national health system. Isn’t it in our interests to help them grow up? The newspapers are contacting me, and I’m going, ‘There’s a fucking scandal going on here. There should be no excuse for ugly people. Twenty per cent of people are going to die a decade early because of sleep apnoea.’ And everyone’s going, ‘Oh, well. Tell me a bit more about mewing.’” He sighs in frustration.
Mew was not struck off the GDC register because of his claims linking early deaths to poor facial form. He was found unfit to practise on three counts: providing unnecessary treatment to a six-year-old girl, Patient A; harming a six-year-old boy, Patient B, with unnecessary treatment; and making claims in a YouTube video that encouraging growth in craniofacial structure could lead to “expansion of the brain”.
“As far as I was concerned, Patient A got a stunning success,” Mew says, scratching at some invisible blemish on his desk. “The mother thinks that; the father thinks that.” The tribunal accepted that the family had no complaints. Mew was reported to the GDC by a hospital consultant who happened to see Patient A in the middle of her treatment with Mew and was concerned by what he saw.
Patient B’s parents did complain. They had paid Mew £12,500 for three years of treatment, during which their six-year-old son was supposed to wear a head and neck appliance 24 hours a day. (The tribunal heard that Mew initially wanted the boy to begin treatment at age two, but decided against it as he didn’t have enough teeth at the time.) They said he struggled to keep the devices on for as long as the treatment demanded. A dentist who worked with Mew at his clinic told the tribunal that the boy would have “seizure-like episodes if pushed too far” to wear them.
Tantrums, Mew says. “Basically, he would have a meltdown, scream and shout. It was obvious that the child was in charge of this family,” he declares. “You’ve got children. Have you had any experience with ‘seizure-like episodes’? Banging fists on the floor? Clearly, the boy was playing them up.”
The boy’s mother told the tribunal Mew was a “dangerous professional who needs to listen to his patients more”. But Mew claims the problem was that the boy’s parents were neither enforcing compliance nor stopping the treatment, and the devices hurt because they weren’t being used as directed. “I’d already said to the mum, ‘If this is not for you, then please stop.’”
In the third count against him, the GDC claims Mew stated in a YouTube video that creating enough space for the tongue can influence “expansion of the brain, expansion of the dental arches as well”. But when Mew shows me the video and I hear his words in context, it’s clear to me that he is making a joke: he’s saying if people change their mindset and are open to new ideas, their dental arches might expand, too. Still, the GDC ruled against him on all counts and he lost his licence to practise. Mew’s appeal against the ruling will reach the high court this summer.
After Mew was struck off in November, the British Orthodontic Society (BOS) issued a statement: “There is no scientific evidence to suggest patients can change the shape of their face or improve their intelligence by chewing or holding teeth and the tongue in a closed position, or indeed making any kind of facial movements. The BOS funds research into orthodontics and is always willing to consider alternative views provided these are backed by scientific evidence.”
Mew still maintains that he has all the evidence – the establishment is just unwilling to recognise it. “I was being had up for being a heretic,” he says, simply. For producing wildly popular videos that went against the orthodontic orthodoxy – and raising questions about prevention of malocclusion, rather than simply treatment – he believes he has been martyred.
While Mew was going through the tribunal, the world began to pay attention to the danger ultra-processed foods may pose to our health. A growing body of evidence has begun to emerge suggesting that soft foods may indeed be making our jaws narrower. But rather than writing research papers and submitting them to scientific journals, Mew has been setting up his home studio. He wants the debate on the causes of malocclusion to take place on TikTok and YouTube.
The legal proceedings have already cost Mew £600,000, he says, as well as his clinical practice and his former family home. Last November, he wrote a blog post calling on the GDC to take seriously the number of suicides among dentists facing fitness-to-practise tribunals. Today, he looks like a broken man.
“Everyone’s screaming at me to start making videos,” he tells me. “The whole marketing team is incapable of moving forward because I am not producing enough stuff. I’ve just been depressed.”
Mew now depends on his mewing content to make a living. But it’s a tricky business model: the beauty of mewing was the promise that people could achieve good looks for free if they worked hard enough. Mewers can mew without Mew.
In his Ultimate Guide to Mewing – over images of smashed clocks, endless calendars and stacks of $100 bills – he says attempting to do so could be a big mistake, warning of “lost time spanning months or even years as you wade through the complexity of mewing without guidance. In the long run, this could prove costlier.” He points viewers towards his new paid-for app. Prices start at £25.
Once he feels mentally strong enough, he tells me, he will “go hard for the truth” on his YouTube channel, from which he still earns revenue. “I think that we’re probably going to have to push on the sensationalism a little bit, because I need to gain traction. I genuinely want the best for the population, so I’m willing to bend the rules.”
His big mission is to get everyone to start documenting their faces on their phones and send the images to him, along with details of their lifestyle, so he can collect data. “I want research by the people, for the people,” he says. Parents should be uploading images of their kids’ faces, too. “They need to. If you have a child that’s growing, it is your responsibility that that child grows well.” He drums his finger on his desk for emphasis. “Do you want your daughter to grow well or badly?” Of course I want her to grow well, I say. Does that mean we should be doing this with our kids’ faces? “Yes,” he replies immediately. “Why not?”
I can think of so many reasons why not. But, in an age of looksmaxxing, when skincare for tweens is booming, when looking less than perfect is increasingly considered a moral failure, one immediately comes to mind. Shouldn’t we be teaching young people that there’s more to life than what your face looks like?
When I put this to Mew, he sighs in disappointment. “Yeah, there’s lots more to life, but this is a hell of a lot of life. That’s my whole thing – how goddamn important how your face grows is. Maybe I’m wrong. Please prove me wrong! Please prove anything I’ve said wrong.” He genuinely believes this – enough to stake his marriage, his home and his business on these arguments.
Before I go, Mew wants to ensure I leave with the right message. “Your tongue position: that’s what you’ve got to work on,” he says, drumming his finger on his desk once again. “Your tongue is hung down. That’s why this area of your face” – he motions to my upper lip – “is dull.” The word lands with a thud between us, and he cocks his head, sympathetically. “Sorry.”
