photo: Lissa Soep - Youth Radio/ BY-NC-SA

It’s said that the ancient Greek inventor Archimedes figured out how to calculate a metal’s density when the king of Syracuse asked him if the royal crown was made of solid gold. It was his eureka moment. More recently, Oakland teenager Mark Anthony Waters of Youth Radio faced a similar quandary. In this case, the jewelry in question is not a royal crown, but a dental one – a fitted gold tooth covering known in hip hop parlance as a grill.

The first time I wore my grill, I was giving a presentation under a projector light. Everyone in the audience was like, “ahh, ahh!” And I was like what’s wrong with you people? And they said, “Your grill, it’s blinding us.”

The grill blinded my mom, too.

"Oh my goodness," she said. "That is ugly, that’s tacky. What purpose does it serve other than the shock value or something?"

To me, the grill was like an ultimate symbol of masculinity. It secretly substituted for what I felt was my lack thereof. But then my mom said…

"Is that really real?"

My mom busted my bubble with that question. What if this thing is fake? I got even more worried about my grill when I talked to my co-worker, Orlando, about his. He was told his grill was 14 carat gold.

"I knew there was something off because my top grill and my bottom grill were slightly different colored yellow gold," Orlando said. "So I knew that there was something a little fishy going on.'

Now, I had a complex about this thing in my mouth. So seeking the VIP treatment, Orlando and I bypassed the pawn shop and headed up the hill to UC Berkeley. We showed our grills to geologist Kent Ross.

I asked him if it was his first time seeing a grill?

"Yes," he said.

"So I’ll never come to UC Berkeley and find Kent Ross with a grill in his mouth?"

"No, I don’t think so. I stay at home and read books a lot."

He also spends lots of time in the lab, with his electron microscope. It looks like a small microwave. Ross sticks our grills inside, triggers the electron gun…

("Electron beams make solid materials give off x-rays that tell you what elements are in the material," Ross told me.)

..and a series of peaks start to appear along a graph on a nearby computer screen.

"Bigger peaks are the more abundant elements," Ross said.

And the biggest peaks we see are the gold ones, so that’s a good sign. But the electron microscope only measures the grill’s surface. To find out whether it’s solid gold, we need to do a density test, weighing the grill in water, then in air.

"I’m gonna go in my office to check my book," Ross said, "to find out what the density of gold and copper and silver are."

The results? While the density of my grill reveals it’s 14 carat through and through, Orlando’s is just a little too light.

Ross: "It looks like there has to be some low-density, cheaper core inside of it, and the gold is coated on the outside."

Poor Orlando.

"I’m crushed," Orlando said, sarcastically. "No man, I didn’t believe those people at all these gold teeth shops were selling solid-gold grills. It is what it is. Fake it till you make it. Or just make it.'

I must admit, I was trying to fake it to make it with my grill. And now that I think about it, it would have been funny if my grill were fake, like my alter-ego dreams of transforming myself into a thug, just because I have a grill. I still don’t want my intelligence insulted by phony merchandise. But I’m no longer trying to prove myself based on the things I buy—or the sparkle off my smile.