For most people, being told you have a big mouth is fighting words. But for one Alaskan, it could mean a world record.
Marie Pearl Zellmer Robinson of Ketchikan is going for the Guinness record for “largest mouth gape (female).” That’s how wide you can open your mouth vertically. Robinson says she’s wanted to be in the Guinness Book of World Records for a long time.
“Every time I see somebody do something amazing, I’m like, ‘Well, I can’t do that,’” she said. “But this one was one that I could do, and I surprised myself even.”
With her mouth closed, Robinson looks like anyone else. But not when she tilts her head back and opens wide. Robinson can easily fit a 12-oz. aluminum can between her teeth.
The current record, set by Samantha Ramsdell of Connecticut, is 6.52 centimeters. Ramsdell also holds the record for “world’s widest mouth” — she’s popular on social media for pushing things like wine bottles and Pringles cans past her shockingly wide-spread lips.
But when Robinson saw the height of Ramsdell’s open mouth, she thought she could do better. So she submitted an application to Guinness, and they accepted it.
But then she had to prove it. According to Robinson, there’s a very strict verification process. When she first went for the record over a year ago, she didn’t get the witness statements and the filming quite to Guinness’s exacting standards.
When she tried again, her gaping mouth had grown by a couple millimeters, which she attributes to practice. With her husband recording and local dentist David Albertson measuring with a set of steel calipers, Robinson’s open jaw clocked in at 7.62 centimeters. That’s about three inches — more than a centimeter larger than Ramsdell’s. The video and the numbers have been submitted to Guinness World Records.
Robinson has known she has a world-class mandible since she was a kid.
“I used to, as a child, shove large objects in my mouth for fun because, you know, when you have siblings you tend to stick stuff in your mouth,” she said. “To show off.”
Robinson said she doesn’t think the skill runs in the family, but it still may be genetic.
“I’m pretty sure what happened is my jaw is just positioned in such a way that it’s just slightly further back, like I can feel my jaw in my ear canal. Which most people apparently don’t,” she said.
Robinson and her husband co-founded a local delivery service called Ketch-A-Courier. Their white cars with a halibut on the side are hard to miss around town. But she says she was inspired to reach for fame by an earlier Ketchikan record.
A little over a decade ago, nearly 2,000 Ketchikan residents broke the world record for “largest rainboot race,” donning rainboots and marching across the Third Avenue Bypass. They were soon dethroned by an athletic club in Ireland.
Now it’s a waiting game for Robinson. She is hoping to see herself flexing her wide open mouth in the world record book by next year, if not sooner.
