John Mew, who has died aged 96, was a maverick orthodontist who in the 1980s pioneered a discipline he called “orthotropics”, which aimed to fix the root cause of crooked teeth – and ugliness in general – by training the way the face grows at an early age, through tongue position and palate-expanding devices.
Orthotropics remained on the fringe of British dental practice but gained a new lease of life in the age of social media, when viral “mewing” videos, promising adult “mewers” a lantern jaw, sharp cheekbones and a straight nose through tongue exercises alone, racked up more than a billion views on TikTok. Earlier this year The Guardian reported that “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 outspoken John Mew cut an exotic figure in the sedate world of British dentistry: a swashbuckling sportsman, in his youth he had raced in Formula 3, flown a Gypsy Moth and been picked for Britain’s America’s Cup team (although he did not compete); later in life he built his own moated castle in Sussex.
Beauty, in his view, was not in the eye of the beholder. “The majority of children from highly civilised countries are doomed to grow up with flat cheeks and big noses,” he claimed, whereas “every single face treated with orthotropics will be good-looking.”
This sprang from his belief that mouth breathing in infancy caused a cataclysmic domino effect on the way the face grew: the entire face would sag, the nose would become bent, the jaws would recede, the dental arch would narrow, and the teeth would become crowded. “When I first suggested that lips could be taped, nearly 30 years ago, I was accused of child cruelty or worse,” he recalled in 2020. “At that time I suggested two vertical strips of non-allergic tape, merely to act as a reminder.” He was convinced that the rise of mouth breathing was a post-industrial-revolution evil, caused by allergens in modern housing and jaws enfeebled by soft, processed food.
Conventional, fixed-brace orthodontics, he decided, might straighten teeth but it “ruined faces” by making the sagging process worse: the upper jaw tended to be pushed back even further through tooth extractions, to line it up with the receding lower jaw. He campaigned against what he saw as a harmful practice, founding the pressure group Orthodontic Outrage and protesting with a sandwich board outside the General Dental Council’s headquarters in Wimpole Street.
The media latched onto him as a talking head. In 1999 he told Channel 4’s Dispatches in no uncertain terms that childhood braces had wrecked Princess Anne’s face: “Her nose only looks so prominent because the jaw has dropped back and the forehead has slipped.”
His alternative was “orthotropics”, meaning correct growth. Encouraged by research on identical twins, which showed that their jaws tended to vary more than any other part of their bodies, in 1981 Mew published his bold “tropic premise”: that almost all malocclusion (crooked teeth) was caused not by genetics but by the environmental factor of poor oral posture, and thus could be treated accordingly – by enforcing good oral posture, when “the tongue rests on the palate with the lips sealed and the teeth in or near contact”.
To encourage this ideal state of affairs, he designed a system of four appliances which he called Biobloc. These widened the maxilla (the upper jaw bone, which includes the palate) by around 10mm to allow the tongue to sit against the roof of the mouth, and included “locks” to train children to keep their mouth closed; patients had to speak through clenched teeth. Some wore swimming cap-type head devices in bed. He claimed his Biobloc method could “create 30 or more millimetres of forward facial growth”.
Mainstream orthodontists were less convinced, and challenged Mew to publish a scientific, evidence-based study of his treatment methods in a peer-reviewed dental or orthodontic journal; he did not, restricting his appearance in peer-reviewed journals to “philosophical overviews”. Others questioned whether Mew was really offering anything new. “What orthotropics seems to be, although this is not clear, is the use of functional appliances with added tongue exercises. Since most orthodontists use functionals, and tongue exercises are likely to have no effect, then one can only assume that he is doing the same as everyone else,” wrote one sceptical contemporary in the British Dental Journal.
John Mew and his wife Jo at their home Braylsham Castle – Connors Brighton
Mew’s unorthodox treatments led to a series of confrontations with the authorities, including large fines by the NHS, which had been paying patients’ bills but had not approved the method. In 1987 he secured a victory of sorts, when the High Court ruled that NHS patients were allowed to continue their treatment with him privately if they wished.
The judge found that the Dental Estimates Board committee, which apportioned funding, had spent more time trying to prevent Mew from being a nuisance than it had assessing the clinical evidence; Mew was awarded substantial costs.
This fuelled his self-image as a latter-day Galileo, suppressed by the dental establishment for challenging dogma; his self-published book even bore on its cover the words “eppur si muove” – “and yet it still moves” – from Galileo’s heresy trial. Relations with the General Dental Council deteriorated to the point that in 2017, aged 89, it removed his licence to practice after he ran a provocative advertisement accusing conventional orthodontists of perpetrating “an illegal scam”; there were also allegations of treatment without consent, and of failing to protect personal information.
Some orthodontists appreciated his contribution as a free-thinking “agent provocateur” in a field where there are still many mysteries. Others found Mew’s narrative of persecution and a conspiracy of silence hard to square with their memory of occasions when dental schools, far from banning him, had asked him to participate in debates or give seminars.
Mew could certainly produce patients satisfied with his treatment, but he seemed ambivalent about scientific scrutiny, routinely calling for studies but then pouring cold water on a 2003 randomised clinical trial that did not advance his cause, warning that “we should remain highly suspicious of clinical papers, including randomised controlled trials, and base our treatment on the evidence of the basic science.” The Universities of Manchester, Bristol and London invited him to submit his results for a scientific comparison of treatment techniques, but he never did.
In an unguarded moment, when a New York Times journalist asked to look through his unseen archive of patient before-and-after photographs, Mew responded: “What would be the point? If someone doesn’t look good, I’ll just say they didn’t comply [with the demands of orthotropic treatment]; and if they do look good, I’ll just say they did.”
Orthotropics might have petered out as a debate in academic journals had it not been for John Mew’s son Mike, who joined his father’s clinic in Purley, south London, in the late 1990s and from 2012 began posting marketing videos online. These attracted an audience of disaffected young men desperate to enhance their sex appeal by any means possible (an incel – “involuntary celibate” – subculture known as “looksmaxxing”), and who were intuitively sympathetic to the idea of a conspiracy perpetrated by conventional orthodontics.
Contact with what is known as the “manosphere”, both in person at conventions and online on websites including Sluthate, prompted Mike Mew to simplify the message of orthotropics radically: rather than a treatment for a growing young face involving palate-expanding appliances, it became DIY tongue exercises that adults without supervision could do as a “hack” to restructure their faces.
The term “mewing” emerged organically on incel forums. By 2023 it had gone viral and the Mews became the subject of a Netflix documentary, Open Wide. In 2024 the elderly John Mew made his first TikTok video, and was rapturously received as the Messiah of “mewing”. In November 2024, meanwhile, Mike Mew was, like his father, struck off the General Dental Council’s register; he is appealing the decision.
‘Some may think I’m an eccentric old fool, but I’m a doer with ideas’ – Connors Brighton
John Mew was born in Tunbridge Wells on September 7 1928, the son of a free-thinking orthodontist. When John was 17 he overheard a girl describe him as “the boy with the very long face”. He theorised that he was to blame, because he habitually let his jaw hang down.
Having bought a 1933 500cc Matchless motorbike for £5 on his 16th birthday, he volunteered as a wartime dispatch rider. His frequent crashes in the blackout, and consequent ripped trousers, caused his mother some frustration. At the end of the war he bought a clapped-out 1934 Lagonda for £10, which he rebuilt using Heath Robinson equipment of his own devising, including collecting acetylene in a football bladder. He later built an ash-framed racing car from scratch.
After graduating in dentistry from University College London in 1953, he assisted an orthognathic surgeon who moved jaws forward for aesthetic reasons – this, too, left a strong impression on Mew, who began to think of ways he could achieve this without surgery. He also studied prehistoric human skulls in museums, wondering why they all seemed to have perfectly straight and uncrowded teeth.
From 1965 he specialised in orthodontics, with practices in London and Tunbridge Wells. He used his children as guinea pigs, resorting to hypnosis when his elder son was too distressed by allergies to keep his mouth shut, and inventing a headband with a spike that would poke him on the chin if he opened his mouth. His daughter was given the reverse treatment: a suboptimal diet of puréed foods until she was four, to see how negatively her face was affected. His middle child, Mike, he considered an orthotropic masterpiece.
His research into social anthropology kindled in him a desire to combine “the largest number of pleasing elements into a perfect house”. In 1995 he bought a valley in the High Weald, convincing the planners to let him cut down scores of trees, create an artificial lake and build a castle, part stone, part half-timbered, complete with a three-storey hammer-beamed great hall modelled on Westminster Hall, a dungeon, a minstrels’ gallery, secret passageways and a drawbridge.
Braylsham Castle
Mew and his wife – who bought him a bulldozer – did much of the building themselves. Mew used his training in dental impressions to cast in concrete the faux-stone details and the 80 steps of the spiral staircase. The result won the “self-build” prize at the Homebuilding & Renovating Awards 2001 and was a finalist on Channel 4’s Britain’s Best Home.
“Some may think I’m an eccentric old fool,” Mew said, “but I’m a doer with ideas.”
In 1971-72 he was president of the Southern Counties Branch of the British Dental Association. His books included The Cause and Cure of Malocclusion, his 2013 magnum opus on orthotropics.
John Mew married, in 1964, Josephine Rankine, daughter of Sir John Rankine, governor of Western Nigeria. She died in 2013.
John Mew, born September 7 1928, died June 25 2025
