People usually walk in with one thing on their mind. A chipped corner, a yellow tooth, a gap they've been hiding in photos since college. We'll get to that tooth. But a smile design starts a little further back, with your face.
Why the face comes first
When you smile, it isn't only your teeth doing the work. Your gums show, your lips lift and the muscles of your cheeks pull everything into shape. That's why a set of perfectly white teeth can still look wrong. The gum line might be uneven, or the teeth too long for the lips, or the centre of the smile might sit a few millimetres off the centre of the face.
Smile designing is simply planning all of that together, before anyone picks up a drill. The question we're really answering is what a smile should look like on this particular face, at this age, for this person.
What we actually look at
We start with the line down the middle of your face, through the forehead, nose and chin, and check whether the gap between your two front teeth sits on it. Then we look at the curve of your top teeth's edges and whether it follows your lower lip when you smile, which it does in most pleasing smiles.
After that come proportions: how wide and how long each front tooth is, and how the six of them relate to each other. (That one gets a whole post of its own.) We look at how much gum shows and whether it's level from side to side. We look at colour, and not just how white the teeth are but whether that shade suits your skin, your eyes and your age.
And we check your bite. A beautiful smile that doesn't meet properly when you chew won't last, so function is never an afterthought.
It isn't only for big makeovers
A single crown on a front tooth needs the same thinking, because it has to sit comfortably next to its neighbours in shape, shade and position. The difference is how much time the planning takes. For one tooth it might be ten minutes. For a full smile it can mean a few visits, a set of photographs and a trial smile you can actually see in your own mouth before anything is made.
When it works, people rarely say "nice teeth". They tell you that you look well, and can't quite say why.
Where this series is going
This is the first of sixty posts, and they're meant to be read roughly in order. We'll start with the basics of how a smile is put together, move on to gentle treatments like whitening and bonding, then porcelain work, gums and alignment, the digital tools we use, and finally the face around the smile.
Next up, you'll meet Dr Parul Sharma Sobti, who looks after this series, and hear why she ended up doing this work.