The contemporary dentists have been evolving in the last decade at giant steps. Even though speaking about perfection in family dentistry was an unimaginable task in the past decade, it is, nowadays, the goal of every dental professional worldwide.

With the rise of cosmetic dentistry and our society’s changes, getting a better smile has become the center of general beauty. Therefore, restoring the lost function of damage or lost teeth is accompanied by the artistic and aesthetical side of cosmetic treatments in most treatment alternatives.

Due to the high demand for cosmetic procedures in current society, researchers and experts have developed new materials, equipment, and technology to perform all types of treatments that behave like natural teeth while offering astonishing results. Cosmetic dentistry is born from that tendency, allowing dentists to create a perfect smile through procedures such as smile designs, dental whitening, or implants.

What is a Perfect Smile?

Due to the subjectivity of beauty, establishing a norm for perfection in dentistry is a complicated matter. However, anatomy studies and expert knowledge have created a profile that follows various standards and universal guides to transcend this subjectivity. With those guides, your dentist can calculate your face and body’s proportions to create restorations that please the human eye with objectivity.

Now, smiling is a fundamental daily action that entangled us in the social environment, reflecting happiness and satisfaction with others and ourselves. Therefore, when we talk about perfect smiles, we mean the aesthetic and functional profile shown whenever you smile.

Although you might believe that whiter is better every time, there are many other factors to consider when performing a cosmetic dental treatment. In a nutshell, every dental procedure aims to recover the lost function while recovering the appearance in the most natural way possible. Thereby, most times, dentists need to consider several elements before deciding what to do and how to do it, instead of making things whiter or bigger.

What are The Benefits of Having an Esthetic Smile?

As expected, your smile affects your self-image, general appearance, and, naturally, your self-esteem directly. Nowadays, expectations of society and the influence of our culture have changed our ideas of beauty. Thereby, your smile has become a primary center of attention and a keystone for contemporary beauty.

Furthermore, having crooked, chipped, or missing teeth affect your oral health just as it does with your image.

On one side, losing one or more teeth, having a fractured tooth, or suffering cavities can lead to other oral problems and diseases. From the incapacity to chew correctly to difficulties while speaking, among other daily tasks, oral conditions can escalate rapidly, creating discomfort and affecting your quality of life, particularly if they’re neglected.

Moreover, many dental problems can affect your general appearance and self-esteem, preventing you from having an appropriate social life and limiting your confidence.

Improving your smile will not only help you to look better, but it will also improve the general performance of your teeth, the state of your gums, and your hygiene. Moreover, having a healthy and beautiful smile significantly influences your image, attractiveness, and age.

Most times, transforming an affected smile to a better-looking profile represents a drastic change for the better for many people.

How are Perfect Smiles Done?  

Just like other dental care treatments, creating a new smile requires a trained and knowledgeable team, backed by a careful and thoughtful study that allows dentists to create a new smile.

The main procedure behind a smile transformation is the smile design, which is the most requested and frequent cosmetic dentistry procedure. During this treatment, the dentists use various rules and proportions to recreate beauty standards following a golden ratio formula or golden mean. Using these parameters while combining them with conventional cosmetic treatments, your dentist can perform multiples procedures, restoring and recovering a beautiful smile.

However, due to the individual and customized feature of a smile design, the dentists must analyze and evaluate the state of your mouth to accomplish three things:

Successfully Identify All The Problems

To do so, your dentist needs to carry out a series of x-rays, photography, gypsum models, and sometimes a tomography.

The clinician can find the problem’s source through a correct diagnosis and establish an appropriate treatment plan.

Visualize Possible Results and Alternatives

Thanks to technological advances and the new equipment that came behind them, your dentist can make digital reconstructions and projections in real-time to show you the treatment’s possible results. Pieces of technology such as CAD-CAM, oral scanners, and digital reconstruction allows your dentist to take all the information gathered during the previous studies and process it through specialized software. With this aid, the clinician can plan, show, and design your new smile.

Pick The Appropriate Techniques and Treatments

A smile design can be challenging because it involves both the solution to your dental problems and the artistic and cosmetic approach. Moreover, a single smile design can require multiple procedures to recover a healthy and fantastic smile. Therefore, it is essential to cover all the previous steps to create a perfect smile and avoid emergency dental services.

How Does The Smile Design Work?

As we mentioned, smile design is a procedure that involves multiple treatments. Besides the previous measures, the treatment might require several other steps to get the final results.

Every smile design is different, and the number of treatments needed will depend on the case’s difficulty and the needs you might have. As a result, every smile design is a completely customized procedure, created for your convenience and personalized for your goals and expectations.

However, among the multiple procedures possible, smile design usually involved the following treatments:

  • Porcelain or composite veneers
  • Composite fillings and reconstructions
  • Teeth whitening
  • Dental implants (in case of teeth loss)
  • Crowns or bridges
  • Orthodontic treatment
  • Gingivectomy or gingivoplasty.

The order or need for one particular procedure will depend on the diagnosis and the treatment plan. Nonetheless, smile designs are usually well-organized and structured treatments, created to fit your time, budget, and availability.

Finally, with the correct planning and study, and the aid of modern technology, you can have the smile you have ever wanted.

REFERENCES

  • Arias, D. M., Trushkowsky, R. D., Brea, L. M., & David, S. B. (2015). Treatment of the Patient with a Gummy Smile in Conjunction with Digital Smile Approach. In Dental Clinics of North America. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cden.2015.03.007
  • Bhuvaneswaran, M. (2010). Principles of smile design. Journal of Conservative Dentistry. https://doi.org/10.4103/0972-0707.73387
  • Kravitz, N. D. (2017). Smile Analysis and Design in the Digital Era. Journal of Clinical Orthodontics : JCO.
  • Miro, A.-J., Shalman, A., Morales, R., & Giannuzzi, N. J. (2015). Esthetic Smile Design. Dental Clinics of North America. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cden.2015.04.001
  • Sharma, P. K., & Sharma, P. (2012). Dental Smile Esthetics: The Assessment and Creation of the Ideal Smile. Seminars in Orthodontics. https://doi.org/10.1053/j.sodo.2012.04.004
  • Ward, D. H. (2015). Proportional Smile Design: Using the Recurring Esthetic Dental Proportion to Correlate the Widths and Lengths of the Maxillary Anterior Teeth with the Face’s Size. In Dental Clinics of North America. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cden.2015.03.006