09 March 2021

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Aiming to the Perfect Smile

Lorenzo Breschi

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During these times in which all the world is asked to wear masks, we truly understand how much our smile is important. Smiling to give a good impression to the person we’re just introduced to, smiling to thank the man who is holding the elevator door for us, or smiling because we just met an old friend we were not seeing for a long time. 

Nonetheless, the mouth of a face we know is extremely important during the process of recognizing someone. 

Is then understandable, how much a beautiful smile can help self-esteem, social standing, and can open opportunities that otherwise one would not have imagined.

Our job is to give patients a healthy and beautiful smile. 

The scientific literature helps us with several rules and guidelines for analyzing and describing the appearance of our patients during the initial diagnostic and treatment planning phase. Most of the articles of the last decades tried to create a link between mathematical and physical laws to what we consider beautiful or esthetic. 

Besides, every day, new digital tools are coming onto the market, helping us to analyze patients' smiles, and to propose a treatment plan that will transform a smile, into a “perfect one”. Other software can previsualize what the result of the proposed treatment plan could be and let the patients understand how their face could look like with the smile they have always dreamed of.

However, who decides what a perfect smile is? Indeed, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A smile that answers all the esthetic requirements could look uninteresting to someone. A diastema or a tipped tooth could be for the patients, what makes them beautiful and unique. The complexity of our job is exactly to find out what is that our patients want and believe beautiful. To do so, software and apps are not sufficient. It takes a lot of experience and the care to scrupulously listen to patients and to complete a thorough anamnesis. 

So, before taking in our hands a bur, is paramount, leaving behind the mathematic and the lows of symmetry, to ask our patient if they are happy with their smile. And probably we’ll find out that, more often than not, the dream smile of a patient is the one they are already wearing.