I first saw gold teeth in my hometown of Houston, TX worn by gangsters in the early 90s. Most of these were permanent gold caps on only one or two teeth. As the 90s progressed into the new millenium, rappers and gangsters were getting removable grillz in lieu of permanent ones. When I was a teenager in the early 2000s, a local jeweler got famous after figuring out how to set diamonds into grillz using pavé setting, allowing entire fronts of teeth to be covered in diamonds through the use of creatively placed prongs. He changed the entire game shortly after when he popularized his invisible-set diamond grillz, a prongless technique that made the diamonds appear to be stuck to the gold without any prongs at all. I was fascinated. I wanted to learn how to make grillz, but jewelers were famous for keeping their methods secret. After writing a paper about the sculptor Auguste Rodin in my freshman year of high school, I learned about the lost-wax casting process that he used to make huge bronze sculptures. This clued me into one part of the grillz-making process: the lost-wax process was the exact same method jewelers used for pendants and grillz. With the first step figured out, I began a journey of learning how to make grillz. Many other jewelers would help me along the way as they saw how serious I was about learning the craft. After completing my first set of grillz for myself, I began selling them to friends, trading them for tattoos, and using them to pay off gambling debts.