On Tuesday Jason Derulo demonstrated a horrifying “life hack” dubbed “the rotating corn challenge“, the effect of which was to destroy his front teeth.

By Wednesday the “Talk Dirty” singer had already posted a video showing off a perfect set of apparently repaired teeth, but the real question is if his teeth were damaged in the first video at all.

On first viewing, if you don’t know what to expect, the video is pretty convincing. Derulo begins the video—which is accompanied by the text “don’t try this”—with a full set of teeth. He starts the drill spinning and peels a strip of corn from the cob as it slowly speeds up. Then, just as the drill really gets going, Derulo shouts out, and pulls away to reveal two stumps where his front teeth used to be. There’s no trick involved in the missing teeth—they are clearly gone, and not even Cats star Jason Derulo (of junk-shrinking CGI fame) has the special effects budget to convincingly mask intact teeth for a TikTok video. So the question isn’t if his front teeth are missing by the end of the video, it’s whether he really had them to begin with.

You may be shocked to learn that many of the celebrities with the pearliest of pearly whites have been lying to you. Those aren’t their real teeth! Whether it’s part of a vain effort to eliminate minor imperfections or a necessary reconstruction following previous damage, many of the nicest looking teeth you’ve ever seen are porcelain products of dental technology.

In Derulo’s case, it could be that he damaged his front teeth years ago and has had relatively delicate veneers in place ever since. If they were starting to come loose, and it was time to replace them anyway, it could be that Derulo would have staged a scenario to intentionally “F*** It Up” for the purpose of the corn cob video and a follow up with his girlfriend, Jena Frumes—in which he uses the word “dethpicable” like he’s Daffy Duck…

Considering the kind of nonsense that generally comprises his TikTok content—“pranking” Movi3 and breaking a fake bottle over YouTuber Max Goodrich’s head—it seems more than likely this is exactly what’s going on. And the closer you look at the first video, the more it seems staged. Why, for example, does Derulo lean into the spinning cob—as well as squeezing the trigger, causing it to spin even faster—in the moment after he shouts out? If you felt your teeth getting wrecked, wouldn’t you jerk backward rather than leaning into that disaster? The alternative theory is that Jason Derulo’s brain doesn’t work like the rest of ours, and he really did just demolish his front teeth on a corn cob.

Regardless of how it really happened, Derulo’s teeth are fixed up now, and he’s back to his old self—putting more nonsense on TikTok. But if you feel like flinching, it’s worth checking out the original video and buying into the illusion for a few deeply unsettling seconds.