…Someone had lipstick on their teeth?

People would rather try to subtly and politely tell a person that they have something in or on their teeth than tell them outright. If someone were to point out something in a person’s teeth they could be considered rude, and risk embarrassing the person with stuff in their teeth. When someone has something on their teeth the responsibility of politely telling them falls on the person they are locked in a conversation with, which can sometimes lead to some awkward and maybe even embarrassing conversations.

I put this to the test to see if anyone would tell me that I have lipstick on my teeth in a high school setting. In high school, it is expected that outfits be polished and makeup pristine. There is not to be a hair out of place, so the idea of purposely having messy lipstick was a little daunting. Discretely reapplying my messy lipstick between classes was humorous to me even after loosening my nerves after the first round of experiments.

“It was my first instinct to tell you, but I did consider that you might think it was mean,” senior Isabel Solheim said. She was the first of many throughout the day to let me know there was lipstick plastered on my two front teeth, though none of them knew it was put there intentionally.

I was a little scared of how people might tell me that there was lipstick on my teeth, but I wasn’t sure I would prefer it if my friends and peers left me in blissful ignorance for the rest of the day and discover in horror that my teeth had been bright red for the whole day. My mission was set and I intended to set out and find the answer, not only for myself, but for everyone who has realized hours later they had been in a compromising situation for the entire day.

“It feels like a very Minnesota thing to ignore it,” senior Sintra Nichols said. “I thought it would come out on its own eventually.” She had tried to subtly tell me there was lipstick on my teeth a few times, but eventually just came right out and said it, making sure to apologize beforehand.

Before each person through the day told me I had lipstick on my teeth I saw three tell-tale signs: they would glance down at my teeth at least twice, they would lick their own teeth as if trying to tell me to do the same without having to actually say the words then they would purse their lips as they waited for me to finish talking so they could confess as politely as they could that I had a smear of lipstick on my teeth.

“It comes out of personal experience, people know what it’s like,” senior Emily Scherber said. “Everyone knows that type of embarrassment.”

She made an excellent point, and when I stopped to reflect after every test subject I kept coming back to this idea. People are empathetic creatures by nature, and when we see someone going through something we know and have personally felt we feel compelled to help.

Most people who saw the lipstick on my teeth told me as soon as they could. This is a pattern that followed through my whole day, some people even went as far as interrupting me as I was speaking so they could tell me. One trend I noticed particularly often was if we were surrounded by a group of other people the lipstick went ignored.

“If there were other people around you I probably wouldn’t have told you,” math teacher Rob Benson said. This was a popular train of thought throughout the day as a few people let the swipe of lipstick on my teeth go untold to spare me what they expected to be a wave of embarrassment in front of my peers.

Why would they try to spare the embarrassment of being told that I have lipstick on my teeth, yet they were alright letting me go through my day beyond them with bright red lipstick staining my teeth? The only thing almost everyone of my test subjects had in common was a similar thought process in how they would handle this situation with a stranger.

“If I didn’t know you I wouldn’t have said anything,” Solheim said. “Someone I was passing in the hallways I wouldn’t have said anything to.”

We feel a desperate need to please and impress people, particularly strangers. This could be considered an advantage and yet also a negative. whether positive or negative, it is certainly something that is wired into all of us.

People desperately want to be accepted at every level in society. We wish to be accepted by our peers, our co-workers, our friends and so we act politely and ignore imperfections no matter how small or fixable they are. We smile politely and make it a point to look every where but at the thing glaring at us like a swipe of lipstick on someone’s teeth while they are talking.

“Just meeting people I don’t want to make a bad first impression,” Benson said. “Because they’re just meeting me they might be embarrassed so I might not tell them.”

My experiment led me through some humorous conversations that always ended up back in the same place: societal expectations. Because of the strict regularity of society we would rather let someone discover something embarrassing about themselves out on their own, whether we realize it or not. The one thing we all have in common though is that we sure know how to fake a polite smile.