Components of a Smile

• The Face
• The Lips
• The Gums
• The Teeth & Bite

What is in a smile?

Many elements make a smile beautiful. When a Cosmetic Dentist looks at your smile, they see many things apart from your teeth. They first see how your smile fits the harmony of your face and personality. They look to see how the lips frame the smile and the contour, position, and shape of your gums. The Cosmetic Dentist then evaluates the size, shape, color and bite relationship of your teeth.

Smiles are unique to each person. With all the different ways to improve your smile and/or transform the effects of aging, it is important to select a Cosmetic Dentist to enhance your existing smile while maintaining its uniqueness.

Components of a Smile

• The Face
• The Lips
• The Gums
• The Teeth & Bite

As you will see this all comes full circle and all these elements are interrelated. Your Cosmetic Dentist will evaluate all these areas to create or restore your smile. The more you know about what a Cosmetic Dentist looks at will help you communicate your expectations and achieve the results you will be proud of for years to come.

The Face

Certain face shapes and personalities are associated with shapes of teeth. A face tells a lot about a person, as do their teeth. A Cosmetic Dentist evaluates your facial esthetics to help determine the shape, size and proportion of teeth that would be appropriate for you. 

The Lips

The lips frame the smile and play a very important role in smile evaluation. Lips are as individual as the size and shape of your teeth. Your Cosmetic Dentist will evaluate your teeth inside the framework of your lips to make sure that the size and position of your teeth fit similar to the way an elegant painting fits into a beautiful frame. They will watch the way you talk, laugh and smile. All are important elements for teeth and lips to be in cosmetic harmony.

A Cosmetic Dentist looks at both Upper and Lower Lips individually and collectively.      

The upper lip is complex. There is no absolute norm other than how well it looks on your face. Some people have a lip that comes up too much and others too little. In some circumstances, lips and/or teeth are higher on one side of the face than the other. There are ways to compensate or change both of these situations.

When the upper lip comes up too much you may have a gummy smile* or vertical maxillary excess*. You may also have this if your teeth appear too small or too short for your mouth. In some cases, the position teeth may appear to be sloping up or down from one side of the mouth to the other. All these can be signs related to lip and gum position not being in harmony. Fortunately, there are things that your Cosmetic Dentist can suggest to help develop the right look for you.

A well-developed smile usually follows the contour of the lips, especially the lower lip. Ideally, the lower lip follows the chewing edge of the upper teeth. This edge is the incisal edge* and it helps to frame the smile.

The Gums

Gum quantity, shape and color greatly influence the cosmetics of your smile. Your Cosmetic Dentist can enlighten you to the various options available to make this part of your smile beautiful.

As mentioned in “The Lips”, too much gum showing may make all your teeth or individual teeth appear small or make the gums more noticeable than the teeth. “Black holes” in between the teeth where there are spaces where gum should be is common. Missing gum on the outside of the tooth where recession* has taken place can make a tooth appear taller than another.

The shape of gums to the teeth is like the shape of your eyelid to your eye. Each smile has a particular way the gum accents each individual tooth to create harmony and beauty. You may notice in looking at your own smile that the gum around each tooth is shaped and place differently around every tooth. Making sure that the correct balance of gum contour* is right adds to the effectiveness of a well-defined smile.

Gum color varies with each person’s genetic makeup. In certain instances when a person had a root canal*, trauma, surgery or silver fillings done in the smile zone* a localized dark spot may appear through or on the gum tissue. Many of these situations can be corrected or minimized.

The Teeth & Bite

You cannot mention the teeth without the bite. Most think of the teeth and bite as the starting point when it is the final thing the Cosmetic Dentist looks at when evaluating your smile. The teeth must look beautiful and natural but they must also function so you are comfortable. Your Cosmetic Dentist uses their training and artistic abilities to bring function together with beauty.

Everyone has a perception as to what makes teeth size, shape and color most attractive. Some think all teeth need to be the same size and color. For some this may be exactly what they want and expect. Your Cosmetic Dentist will let you know that is not what occurs in the naturally beautiful smile.

The six front upper teeth naturally vary in color. The front two teeth, the central incisors, are the lightest of the front teeth. The next teeth adjacent to the front two are the lateral incisors. These teeth are smaller and are usually just slightly less bright than the central incisors. The next adjacent teeth are the cuspids or sometimes referred to as the eyeteeth. The cuspids are typically a full shade different than the central incisors. The lower six teeth also vary in shade. The front four are typically about the same shade and the lower cuspids are about a shade less than the lower four front teeth.

Shape is as noticeable as shade in most smiles. Each front tooth has a particular ratio of height to width of each tooth and a relative proportion to the other front teeth. This ratio closely depends upon the shape of the lips and gums. Cosmetic Dentists call these ratios the “Golden Proportions”.