Excellent Smile Designers are Made, Not Born

If you want to upgrade your smile, you need a cosmetic dentist — and pretty much any cosmetic dentist will do, right?

Hardly — a truly skilled smile surgeon can be hard to find, but of course no one will advertise that they're not as experienced or knowledgeable as another. Cosmetic dentistry is only half about space-age polymers, digital imaging and manipulation, and other high-tech wizardry — it's just as much about having an eye for what looks right, and the steady hand necessary to make what you're working on look like the picture you're designing toward.

Smile designers have to understand how each of your physical traits — your height, lip and skin color, the shape of your cheeks and lips, your bone structure, and so on — interacts with your smile to create a grin rather than a grimace. Smiles don't exist in a vacuum; every aspect of your appearance plays in to how well your smile shows itself off.

The problem is that there aren't any legal statutes that determine which dentists are allowed to call themselves 'cosmetic' and which aren't. Anyone with a DDS can claim to be a cosmetic dentist. So how do you know which smile designer you want to work with? Experience.

Drs. Johnson and Risbrudt each have decades of dental experience and years of smile design under their belts, and they can show you hundreds of photos of the patients that they have designed new smiles for — that is the mark of a smile designer you want to work with.

What's the difference? Education. Drs. Johnson and Risbrudt are both devoted to keeping themselves up with their fields, and each one vastly exceeds the state-mandated minimums for continuing education every year. There's a steep learning curve with cosmetic procedures, and only continuously improving your skills — and then applying them — can make a dentist a truly great smile designer.

Smile Aesthetics and Looking Younger through Smile Design

When you look at the human face, the upper lip and everything below it make up about a third of the face — and it's the third of the face that contains the vast majority of the muscles in the human head. Those muscles mean that it's the lower third of the face that conveys the most emotion and expression — but it also means that it's the lower third that is the most affected by aging.

As you get older, the corners of your mouth sag, giving you a very serious appearance when your face is relaxed, even if you're feeling perfectly chipper. The cheeks also sag slightly, throwing off the smile lines at the corners of your mouth. Other small changes to the firmness of your facial flesh show aging quite obviously as well.

That's why, when Drs. Johnson and Risbrudt work on smile design for a patient, they pay close attention to how their operations affect the 'aesthetic age' of their client. Cosmetic dentistry is part science, but it's also part art, and in addition to caring for chipped teeth, malocclusions, and other dental problems, smile design is at its core intended to make you look better — and at least in the USA, better usually means younger.

With a smile design plan, you can make your cheeks firmer, your smile more symmetrical, your teeth whiter, and generally shave years off of your appearance all without the use of potentially harsh chemical treatments. Cosmetic dentistry can reverse the sagging of the lips by building up the teeth, giving you fuller and firmer lips in a single procedure (and without actually messing with your lips at all!)

If you're considering something like Botox or other treatments to bring a youthful look to your face, consider smile design first — because anti-aging treatments should all come with a beautiful smile and healthy teeth!

Porcelain Veneers: The Easy Street to Smile Perfection

Porcelain veneers are thin ceramic 'shells' that are bonded to the front of your teeth. If your incisors and canines aren't as gleamingly white as you'd like them to be, whitening your teeth is a great option — but if they're permanently stained by long-term coffee or tea drinking, smoking, or other discoloration, veneers can be your best bet by far.

Porcelain veneers not only mask discolorations, but they can also be used to brighten teeth, to close gaps between teeth, to lengthen teeth that are too short, or even to repair broken teeth. Wafer-thin veneers are delicate when handled, but once bonded to a tooth are quite tough, also providing a stain-resistance that no other smile design option can give.

Most modern cosmetic dentists, including Drs. Johnson and Risbrudt, consider veneers to be the leading conservative approach to 'perfecting' a tooth's color and size. If your teeth have been exposed to tetracycline, have been broken in an injury, or even have discolored fillings that taint your smile, veneers are likely the answer.

Getting veneers is a multi-step process:

• Your first appointment will be for diagnosis and planning.
• Then you'll come back to get a mold of your teeth taken, upon which the veneers will be based, and have your teeth prepared for the veneers.
• Finally, once the veneers have been sculpted, you'll come back for one last visit during which they'll be bonded to your existing teeth.

Veneers have been shown to stand up to 7-10 years of constant, regular use before needing to be replaced.

Your first appointment will take at least an hour, possibly a few hours depending on the scope of your smile issues. The second involves a minor procedure in which about a millimeter of your enamel is removed before the mold is taken. The laboratory takes 1-3 weeks to fabricate the veneers, after which in the final appointment, the veneers are bonded. That takes a couple of hours. Once you're done, you walk out with the best smile of your life!

Smile Color and How It Changes

One of the most fundamental elements in smile design is making sure that your smile is as sparkling and white as it can be — but that's not always as obvious as simply bleaching your teeth. That's because there's a lot more to a tooth's color than just its color. When we take our first digital photograph of your smile for our Smile Design process, we take a look at several aspects of your smile's color composition:

• The overall color of the teeth.
• The gradient (how the color changes) as the teeth progress toward the gums.
• The relative brightness of each tooth.
• The opaqueness/translucency of your teeth and how it changes.
• The absence or presence of white vertical lines in your teeth.

The reason we measure all of these attributes is that when we do a smile design, we have to make sure that, in addition to every individual tooth coming out beautiful, the entire smile matches beautifully as well — and that's actually somewhat difficult.

That's because teeth aren't ever one color. Most teeth have more yellow tint toward the top because the underlying dentin is showing through the translucent enamel (nothing to do with plaque or tartar, it's all inside the tooth.) Similarly, most incisors and canines have an almost entirely translucent area at the very tip of the tooth where it's entirely enamel. Matching those subtle color changes can be quite a challenge.

Color-matching issues are one of the major reasons why cosmetic dentists often suggest that people who want a truly stunning smile get porcelain veneers — they're easy, they're all the same color, and that color happens to be the stunning white that everyone wants to have peeking out from between their lips.