What Makes a Smile Beautiful?
Your smile is one of the first things that people see when they look at you. Your eyes, nose, mouth, and ears all contribute to facial beauty with your smile ranking among the most important facial features.
What types of things are most important in a smile?
Symmetry- while having your two front teeth as a mirror image of either is the most important, the symmetry of your smile from one side to the other ranks high when people evaluate the beauty of your smile. In addition, the symmetry of your smile within your face is also an important part of how people evaluate the beauty of someone’s smile.
Gum to tooth ratio- No one wants a “gummy smile” but there is a value to showing the right ratio of your teeth and gums. Showing no gums makes you look older, while showing too much gum tissue reduces the beauty of a smile.
Tooth shape and size- The size of your teeth is important, but even more important is the relative size of the teeth to one another. If some teeth are much larger than others it can create an unnatural smile. Believe it or not, there’s a mathematical formula for the ideal smile. And while there is no one perfect smile, there are things that we can do enhance the beauty of a smile by changing the proportions of teeth to one another. Bigger teeth, in general, are more pleasing than small teeth. Short teeth are less desirable than longer teeth.
Total smile width- Something you may not have thought about is the width of your smile as a whole. Broader smiles, or smiles that show more teeth, are consistently considered as the most beautiful. Wider smiles look whiter simply because of the volume of teeth that is exposed. Even expanding your smile by a couple of millimeters can drastically change how “big” your smile looks to other people.
Tooth color- Tooth whitening is a multi-billion dollar industry, and there are hundreds of products on the market. Everyone wants a whiter smile, but to get there quickly, safely, and without sensitivity is a tricky balance. Read the recent post about whitening for more in depth details, but we feel that we have found a formula to get your teeth whiter in a short amount of time, and keep them white with easy maintenance you can do at home with products that are safe, cost effective and get real results.
If, while reading this, you’ve identified some things about your smile that you’d like to improve come talk with us. You might not even know quite what you’d want to change, you just know you want to have a more beautiful smile. There’s many different things we can use to enhance your smile. Some of them you have heard of, and some of them you may not even know what they are. We can scan your teeth (there’s no charge for a consultation) and pull it up on a screen so we can look at it together! We have seen it all, and there’s lots of options that get you where you want your smile to be.