At my mother's house there's a photo of me as a kid, milk teeth out, one of the front ones gone slightly black after a fall I don't remember. The funny part is that I'm smiling in it. Tiny, unbothered, blackened tooth front and center. The kid in that photo didn't know yet that smiles were a thing you could mess up.
But not to worry, some years later I got the memo.Someone called me horseteeth once, which sticks harder than chewing gum, and it doesn't help that I had a tooth pulled out as a teenager, so I have a slight gap on one side. Then there was the time I was drawing an illustration for a children's story and was told the character's smile should be "more beautiful," that the crooked teeth I'd given her wouldn't do. All of it, in the end, points to the same lesson, taught from the time you're a kid:Smile, but correctly.Smile, but on brand.Smile like you've read the room.
I didn't expect this issue to drag me back to a childhood image, but it did. Having conversations on masks, on teeth as character, on how we start curating ourselves around all the unnecessary comments coming from outside. It doesn't exactly help our self-image when we are bathing in the great convention of insecurities that is social media, which compared to Hellenistic times and their sudden circulation of images, is fuming on steroids. Platforms overflowing with pictures have made us curate everything. The Instagram smile. The social smile. The LinkedIn smile, which is its own particular crime. A whole part of the face that only really shows up when you mean it, and somehow we've started managing it like a brand.
The Greeks had something called the archaic smile, that tight little grin on their earliest statues, with a level of warmth that can only be compared to a passport photo. It took until the Hellenistic period for sculpture to stop posing and start showing what bodies actually look like: tired, ageing, struggling, real. I keep thinking the photo of me, black tooth and all, is my own Hellenistic smile. A time before all the performance kicked in. Before I started seeing the archaic smile coming back around. Growing up really does feel like a trap.
Making a printed magazine in 2026 is, objectively (even though objectivity is a myth, haha), a bit of a mad thing to do. There are so many horrible things happening in the world, everyone is doomscrolling on the tram, and here we are putting words and images onto paper that will not refresh, has no algorithm, has no clue if you've opened it. In the last issue, Anne Vetik wrote about exactly that endless scroll, about what it does to keep chasing the next shiny thing online: "Instant gratification is a candy wrapper, you chase the sparkle, then wonder why your teeth are decaying." Which only shows that teeth are the next IT thing, haha. But occasionally it's nice to have something heavy in your hands, something that doesn't reload, something to hold onto in these rapid days.
The reason I kept yapping about childhood is that making Trickster Magazine, for me, still carries the joy and silliness of the playground. This issue is for the people who showed up and gave themselves over so generously, who made the whole thing worth the effort, and honestly made me smile a lot through everything they shared. It's also for the kid in the photo, who hadn't yet learned to hide her teeth, and let that blackened front tooth shine like she meant it.
Smiling widely,See you in the next era.Editor-in-chiefDiandra Rebase