I have long been an ardent supporter of natural-looking dentistry. Oh, I know it’s fashionable to have a set of teeth that look like the keys on a Steinway piano,  but I can see a swing towards less perfect pearlies in the offing – especially following the popularity of The Artist star Jean Dujardin.

Over the last ten years the goal in male grooming, teeth-wise, has been the perfect Hollywood smile – a set of perfectly straight paper-white nashers, bleached, braced and veneered to unnatural perfection.

Personally, I find perfect teeth on people – male or female – deeply unattractive. Quite the opposite in fact – I’m a sucker for a chipped or crooked tooth. And I’m with Chaucer when it comes to gaps. Anyone who remembers their Canterbury Tales will know that the Wife of Bath was famously ‘gap-toothed’ – in Medieval times a sign of lustfulness.

No, imperfect teeth can be sexy. If you want proof of this just look at Jean Dujardin. Yesterday I went to see The Artist (one of the best films I’ve seen in years) and also managed to catch the Baftas on TV later that evening, where he walked off with the Best Actor gong. This is a man whose teeth are all over the place by Hollywood standards and yet, he is already judged as having one of the sexiest smiles in the industry.

People noticeably palpitate at the sight of those not-quite-so-pearly pearlies (one person on Twitter made me laugh out loud by proclaiming: “I would marry Jean Dujardin’s teeth!”). So let’s hear it for crookedness, unevenness and the occasional quirkily-angled fang  -  and long live the perfection that is imperfection!