Fifty Shades Of Grey may have been the literary sensation of the year but in the world of reality TV and Saturday-night talent shows, a sort of parallel universe where nobody reads anything longer than a tweet or a Sun headline, it's Fifty Shades Of White that's got everyone talking.

If I was writing an erotic thriller based around the exploits of the stars of The Only Way Is Essex, for instance, I'd make one of the central characters an orthodontist who specialised in tooth whitening. Every time I turn on the programme somebody seems to be trotting off to have their gnashers buffed into an unnatural-looking shade of fluorescent white. James Argent and Joey Essex have both had work done on their smiles, and, on the distaff side, it's as de rigueur as fake tan and vajazzling.

I say "buffed" but teeth whitening actually involves a little more than just a duster, some polish and a bit of elbow grease. You need special hydrogen peroxide cream, a halogen light, a mouthguard – and maybe a friend with a camcorder ready to film you afterwards and post the results on YouTube.

If you have a few thousand pounds to spend, you can fork out on dental veneers, which come in shades such as American White and Hollywood. (I don't think there can be 50 shades of white, just as there aren't really 50 Inuit words for snow. Even if there were, everyone would just go for the dazzlingest. And if that isn't a word, it should be.)

Simon Cowell has been banging on for years about the need for pearly whites on both men and women so it's no surprise that the latest recruit to the teeth-whitening cult is X Factor winner James Arthur. He said this week that he wants to get his teeth done as part of an orthodontic makeover that will also straighten them. But, he added, "I'm not going Joey Essex or [Simon] Cowell," by which he means he isn't going for that blinding, Tom Cruise gleam. No, he just wants to be unashamed to open his mouth in public, which is perfectly reasonable for a man about to embark on a career as a professional singer.

That's the price of fame, I suppose, though I'm not sure I would ever want artificially whitened teeth. Don't get me wrong: my gnashers are as bad as the next man's so it's not as if they don't need pepping up a bit. But teeth whitening and veneers smack of cosmetic surgery to me and that's a pressure I feel quite strongly about not giving in to. It would be a different story if my career depended on it, of course, but it doesn't. Not until I win Britain's Got Talent with my virtuoso kazoo-playing, anyway.

I'll stick with the shade of white I have. If it was on a chart for posh paint-makers Farrow & Ball it would probably be called something like Armitage Shanks Barlinnie, but I'd describe it as the colour of the once-cream but now nicotine-stained wallpaper in the last pub in Scotland to still sell whelks from a jar on the bar-top.