John Mew, a British orthodontist whose unorthodox methods for fixing crooked teeth and resculpting jaws, including a technique widely known as mewing, were dismissed by the medical establishment but embraced by a huge audience online, died on June 25 at his home in Heathfield, in East Sussex, England. He was 96.
His death, in a moated castle that he built in the 1990s, was announced in a video tribute by his son Mike Mew, who was also his business partner and fellow orthodontist. It was not widely reported at the time.
“To many he was a genius, a visionary,” Mike Mew said in the video. “But he was also considered a heretic and a charlatan in equal proportions.”
Dr. Mew’s philosophy was on the fringe of orthodontics. He held that crooked teeth were the result not, as mainstream orthodontists believe, of genetics, but of lifestyle and environmental changes since the 18th century that caused jaws to grow smaller and recessed, leading teeth to come in misaligned. He theorized that soft processed foods made jaw muscles weak, and that as people moved into polluted cities, they developed allergies that caused them to inhale through their mouths, not their noses, which warped their jaws.
“As a result,” William Brennan wrote in a profile of the Mews in The New York Times Magazine in 2020, Dr. Mew believed that “we’ve been robbed not only of tidy smiles” but also of “the well-defined faces that were the birthright of our ancient ancestors, and which Mew regards as the mark of true beauty.”
His solution, the foundation of what he called orthotropics, had the goal of increasing tongue space, expanding jaws and dental arches, and improving facial structure. It involves chewing harder food and using a specialized appliance for the mouth that moves the upper jaw and teeth forward. The appliance makes it uncomfortable for children to drop their lower jaw down or back.
“Effectively, you are getting children back to where they would have been at around 200 years or so ago,” Mike Mew wrote in an email, “and then teaching them to stand up straight with their lips together.”
Orthotropics also calls for pressing the tongue against the roof of the mouth, a technique that became known as mewing, for up to eight hours a day. Mewing, Mike Mew said, should be done “all the time that you are not actively chewing, talking or processing.”
In his Times Magazine article, Mr. Brennan noted, “Where traditional orthodontists focus most of their efforts on straightening teeth, Mew says his aim is to ‘save the face.’”
And, he maintained, to turn ugly faces into good-looking ones.
While Dr. Mew’s practice for decades focused on treating children up to the age of 8, whose young jaws are flexible, the association of his work with a return to ancient standards of beauty and traditional masculinity — as well as his defiance of the medical establishment — led him to be embraced more recently by adults, including some in the reactionary corners of the internet.
His and his son’s videos on YouTube, which have drawn millions of views, found an audience over the past decade in the online message boards of self-described involuntary celibate men, or incels, who have misogynistic explanations for their lack of romantic success and began using the term “mewing” for Dr. Mew’s method.
Mewing also found traction in the so-called manosphere; with elements of the alt-right, which embraced his theories about idealized male beauty; and with alternative health and beauty vloggers, including many women.
The Guardian reported this year that teachers in Britain and the United States had “complained that students are refusing to answer questions in class because opening their mouths would interrupt their mewing.”
Though some doctors have treated patients with Dr. Mew’s techniques, traditional orthodontists, who extract teeth and use braces and other devices to straighten misaligned teeth, have been highly critical of him.
“There is no mainstream scientific evidence on facial growth in adults that supports the concepts behind ‘mewing,’” Kevin O’Brien, a prominent critic of Dr. Mew’s and an emeritus professor of orthodontics at the University of Manchester, wrote on his blog last year. “Furthermore, when I apply what I know about craniofacial growth, it’s difficult for me to understand how holding your tongue on the top of your mouth can change the position of facial bones.”
In 2017, John Mew had his license revoked by the General Dental Council in Britain; the reason, he said, was an advertisement he had published that accused orthodontists of committing an “illegal scam” on patients with their treatments.
When he appealed the revocation, Dr. Mew did not admit any wrongdoing or make any concessions and “got nowhere” with the council, Mike Mew wrote in an email. He said that his father had not practiced since losing his license but had continued to advise dentists and orthodontists, in addition to remaining active on Facebook and TikTok.
Mike Mew’s dental license was suspended last year for misconduct involving his treatment of two children. He is appealing the decision.
John Mew wrote a book, “The Cause and Cure of Malocclusion” (2013), and he and his son were the subject of “Open Wide,” a 2024 Netflix documentary.
John Roland Chandley Mew was born on Sept. 7, 1928, in Tunbridge Wells (now Royal Tunbridge Wells), a town in Kent, England. His father, Gordon, was a dental surgeon. His mother, Joyce (Chandley) Mew, managed the home and was also chairwoman of the populist British Housewives League. In 1951, she and three other women burned their ration books in front of the House of Commons to protest the British government’s continuation of food rationing after World War II.
Dr. Mew graduated with a dental degree from University College London in 1953. He also engaged in various other pursuits as a young man, including sailing competitively and racing Formula 1 and Formula 3 cars. After dental school, he went to work for a specialist in corrective surgery on the jaw, known as orthognathic surgery.
He also studied jaw specimens in museums and concluded that misaligned bites did not exist hundreds of years ago. As he thought about what might have caused the misalignment, he focused on the upper jaw, or maxilla, and surmised that any deficiency in the lower jaw, or mandible, was a side effect of one in the upper.
“In Mew’s telling, this is how modern faces begin to degrade,” Mr. Brennan wrote in The Times Magazine. “If the maxilla doesn’t grow forward or wide enough, the mandible adjusts backward and down, so that the chin recedes and the face appears to lengthen.”
The result, Dr. Mew said, will cause bags under the eyes and make the nose look large, which he vowed to ameliorate through orthotropics. Throughout the 1970s, he tested his theories on his children: Mike, the middle of three, became the main success story, with a square, sturdy lantern jaw that he attributes to his father’s methods.
All three children, including his other son, William, and his daughter, Rosie Rinker, survive him, along with seven grandchildren and a brother, Peter. His wife, Josephine (Rankine) Mew, died in 2013.
In 1981, Dr. Mew published his theory about malocclusion in The British Dental Journal. But he was brushed off, and his beliefs remained on the outskirts of orthodontics. In an article in The Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery in 2019, the dentists Urie K. Lee, Lindsay L. Graves and Arthur H. Friedlander examined the rise in mewing’s popularity on social media.
“Although Mew’s theory does generate some plausible conclusions that can aid our profession in developing future surgical procedures,” they wrote, “the public needs to be made aware that it is not based on sound scientific evidence that would make it a viable alternative treatment to orthognathic surgery.”
Mr. Brennan wrote that he had spotted six plastic bins of patient photos in the basement of Dr. Mew’s castle — but that when he asked if he could look at them, Dr. Mew refused.
“‘What would be the point?’ he said. ‘If someone doesn’t look good, I’ll just say they didn’t comply; and if they do look good, I’ll just say they did.’”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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