What Makes a Smile Beautiful

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There are many opinions about what makes someone beautiful. In some cultures gold front teeth are a sign of wealth and success. Others want their teeth to glow in the dark or sharpened into points. The average person simply wants “straight, white teeth”. Because of the subjective nature of beauty, even dental professionals disagree on most of the factors that make a smile attractive.

Orthodontists are specialists in tooth movement and facial balance. With conventional orthodontic techniques and their advanced skills, they are able to move teeth almost anywhere needed for optimum esthetics and harmony. The detailing needed sometimes takes more time than the patient is willing to invest.

“Cosmetic dentists” often use porcelain veneers to mask crooked teeth. They grind and reshape teeth and bond porcelain facings over the teeth to make them look straight from the outside. Cosmetic dentists have varied opinions about proper tooth sizes, shapes and colors, but they often look artificial.

Patients also have their own ideas about how they want their smiles to look. It’s often very surprising to see the things patients are concerned about compared to what their orthodontist or dentist is concerned about. Sometimes they don’t care about the most obvious things and worry about things that are perfectly normal. For example canine teeth are supposed to be a little pointy, not flat as is often requested.

In an interesting study it was found that orthodontists are more picky and precise about small discrepancies in a person’s smile than general dentists and laypersons. This is one of the tremendous advantages of always using an orthodontic specialist for tooth movement. With the development of Accelerated Orthodontics™ and 3-MSM™, there is now a way to help people who are happy to have an improvement and are not looking to be perfect. This positions Accelerated Orthodontics™ as a compromise between traditional orthodontics, aligner therapy and cosmetic veneers.

In the photographs on the right a young lady had an obvious problem called a “cross-bite”. You don’t have to be a dentist to agree that it didn’t look very good. It was corrected in a few months with Accelerated Orthodontics. Is this result better than a typical cosmetic makeover could provide? Yes. The treatment was conservative, retaining all natural teeth, fast and affordable. Standard cosmetic dentistry would require extraction of a perfectly good tooth and placement of a bridge or implant.

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