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At the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina, which officially came to a close yesterday, we bore witness to all manner of physical feats: quadruple jumps on the ice, switch backside 900s on the halfpipe, alleged double touches on the curling rink. In the end, however, two of the most indelible images from these consistently captivating Games actually came inside the mouths of two young, transcendent American athletes.
First up, 20-year-old insta-legend Alysa Liu. The Bay Area-bred figure skater won gold on Thursday night—the United States’ first in women’s free skating since Sarah Hughes won the top prize in Salt Lake City in 2002—following an epic performance to Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s rendition of “MacArthur Park.” That was only a small glimpse into Liu’s impeccable taste, however.
Everyone watching the figure skating finals immediately took note of Liu’s halo hairstyle, featuring alternating rings of blonde and brunette that she implemented roughly a month before leaving for Italy. But when she twirled her way into America’s heart with her gold-clinching performance, then posed for a seemingly Mac Dre-inspired photo with her hardware, many fans spotted her sick frenulum piercing for the first time.
The piercing—known colloquially as a “smiley”—was a DIY effort by Liu and her sister, Selina. It’s simple, striking, and also a little squirm-inducing. The labial frenulum is a tiny thread of tissue that connects the upper lip to the gum tissue and bone of the upper jaw. You can find yours pretty easily by looking in a mirror and folding your upper lip toward your nose. (The human body has several other frenula as well, including in the lower lip, tongue, brain, and genitalia. You might recall Lena Dunham and Maude Apatow’s characters going to get frenulum piercings in a fourth-season episode of Girls.) When piercing the maxillary labial frenulum with a horseshoe-shaped ring, as Liu did, the jewelry hangs over the front two teeth and is exposed with a smile, hence the name. As Liu explained, she’s had the piercing for two years now, and it was far less painful than it looks.
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What absolutely had to hurt, though, was USA hockey stud Jack Hughes getting his tooth knocked out during the gold medal game against Canada. Before scoring the game winner that secured America’s first men’s hockey gold since the 1980 Miracle on Ice, Hughes took a high stick to the face from Canadian center Sam Bennett. That dislodged a front tooth that Hughes had lost before, and like Liu, also made for some incredible Olympic flicks.
For Hughes, the 24-year-old alternate captain of the New Jersey Devils, a tooth is a small price to pay for sporting immortality. His overtime wrist shot into the back of the net not only put his team on top of the podium, it also ensured that a gaggle of dentists in Newark will be lining up to fix his chompers pro bono.
Hughes—who has also been spotted with Canadian pop star Tate McRae on several occasions—is no stranger to scoring goals. He’s netted over 25 of them in each of the last four NHL seasons, including 43 during the 2022-23 campaign, the most of any Devil. And while his Mike Eruzione moment comes with several questions—why are we settling the biggest hockey game in the world with 3-on-3 overtime? Why didn’t Nathan MacKinnon play the puck when it entered the offensive zone? Why was Cale Makar’s backcheck so lazy?—you can’t question the aesthetic glory of a hockey player cheesing with a gold medal around their neck and a bloody gap in their smile.
With respect to the USA women’s hockey team also winning gold over Canada, Mikaela Shiffrin grabbing gold in slalom skiing, and everything that happened in curling, the lasting images of the 2026 Winter Olympics will be two twentysomething Americans and their wholly disparate, equally charming teeth. As Liu inspires scores of young people across the world to Google “does a frenulum piercing hurt?” and Hughes makes kids wonder if achieving hockey sainthood is worth becoming a toothless wonder, the American home front smiles at them in solidarity.
Norway may have finished atop the medal table, but the Stars and Stripes have the cool kids and their golden grins.