A barber's cape drapes loose across the shoulders. A salon's paper collar merely tucks at the throat. The dental bib, alone among disposable garments, closes itself with hardware: roughly a foot of fine metal beads threaded through two crimped clasps, one at each corner of a tissue-backed paper square. The bib is worn for perhaps twenty minutes, protects a shirtfront from little more than a fine spray and the occasional cotton roll, and is balled up and binned before the patient reaches the parking lot, yet at some point in the middle of the last century someone decided that a paper square needed a proper fastening, and gave it a chain rated for hundreds of clips.
The chain is the durable half of the pairing: nickel-plated, faintly cold against the collarbone, prone to catching the fine hair at the back of the neck on removal. Assistants clip it with one practiced motion, cross-handed, without glancing down; patients who try it themselves invariably get the beads twisted around the clasp. Two sizes exist, adult and small, distinguished only by the printed border, and the border is where most offices put their name, so the bib is the only piece of branded material a patient will wear, and discard, inside of an hour. Only the chain is kept. Front desks collect loose ones in a dish by the sterilizer, unclipped from bibs long since binned, waiting for the next corner to fasten to.